Early

In a little deviation from what might be considered “high” tech this month, I’ve recently been thinking a lot about the role of play in language interventions. Play is closely connected to narrative, as we often use story components to structure our play. I recently presented at ASHA Convention providing a “Play on Words” (click here for the handouts), and discussed a variety of playful contexts that can be used to target language (including narrative) and social learning. In particular, cooperative games with a shared goal and no real “winner”— except the group—can be used to target many communication skills...

Halloween is always a holiday that can be leveraged for engagement (and stories!) with our students. We hope you will add these three resources to your list to “harvest” annually! Through the pandemic telepractice-fest and beyond, I have enjoyed capitalizing on the trend of escape rooms for intervention activities. They make a great collaborative activity and encourage students to “think with their eyes” (ala Social Thinking^®) as they look for clues. Escape “rooms” from HoodaMath contain a brief “story” introduction--why you are trapped there, a Kick-Off, and what you need to plan to do to get out! And what is an escape activity but the exploration of a Setting? Use MindWing’s Setting Map to teach the language underpinnings of describing a setting. In particular, escape games are great for helping students to label the parts of a larger setting...

In this, our last entry in 2021’s Summer Study Series, we’ll review a recent article from leaders in the field who present a very helpful set of 10 principles for narrative intervention that will guide you in this new school year. Additionally, several strategies for leveraging technology will also be described, as we can consider tech a useful tool, however your service delivery evolves in this unfortunately still-weird educational situation. Spencer and Peterson (2020) detail narrative intervention principles and practice tips in their ASHA-accessible article “Narrative Intervention: Principles to Practice.” I love the trend of incorporating the ever-readable web “listicle” as an element of our research literature...

In July’s entry for 2021’s Summer Study Series, we’ll be looking at the critical overlap between narrative and expository language and our students’ access to the academic curriculum. Meaux and Norris (2018) tackle this topic in a tutorial for Language, Speech and Hearing Services in Schools entitled “Curriculum-Based Language Interventions: What, Who, Why, Where, and How?” I have always appreciated ASHA publications’ “tutorial” articles as I have found them to provide the most functional and practical information to be useful in interventions. The other “functional” consideration with this article is that including a focus on curriculum has always seemed natural to me. There is so much inherent language in school curricula and, from a linguistic perspective, this potential gap in comprehension and expression is why students receive our services...

Continuing here with 2021’s Summer Study Series, this post will be a little different. Rather than focusing on analysis of one article for further learning, I’d like to point you in the direction of a few resources related to a theme: mental health and recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. We’ve all heard and experienced it in some way, at this point almost a cliché; it was a school year like no other. Loss of a feeling of safety, of connection, of experiences, of freedoms, perhaps of health or people in our lives, these all pervade our memories of the past year. I’m of the mindset that every little bit of processing is potentially helpful. However, you may feel uncomfortable or unequipped to go into these topics in personal narrative with your students. For some support, I’d like to point you in a few directions...

The “Give a Story to Get a Story” technique is one we all know makes sense. We’ve seen what often happens when we ask students to produce a narrative out of the blue. More often than not, we are rewarded with a blank stare! The use of the “Conversational Map,” the formal name for this technique, was first described by Peterson and McCabe (1983) and, in web-accessible articles, adapted by McCabe and Rollins (1994) and Hadley (1998). In my experience, these articles hit on principles applicable when working with preschool, through adult clients, who can all benefit from language scaffolding...