Everything is Language

I walked into Rosemary Kennedy School with ideas in my mind.  It was my first job out of school, I was blessed that my supervisor agreed to be my CFY mentor.  I had a caseload of 11 children and was ready to stand on my head to get the job done.  Floortime/DIR approaches were going to be used, AAC technologies were going to be expanded, and I was going to help all of my students. Then I realized I was going to have to test some of my students. The days of a clinical evaluation in grad school went dancing through my head.  Articulation, voice, fluency, hearing, multi-faceted language evaluation, conversational speech sample, language sample...you get the idea. I quickly learned through observation that a school triennial evaluation for CSE and a clinical evaluation are 2 different animals.  Completely. Clinical evaluations require time you don't have in school. Clinical evaluations look at the whole picture while a school evaluation is really looking at academic impact. Clinical eva

Every Fall, my school gets some incoming students.  One of the tried and true goals goes something like this: "The student will sequence 3 pictures into a cohesive narrative" or "The student will organize 3 pictures and sequence using words like first, next, last." All seriousness aside, I see the value in sequencing goals.  After all, a Kindergartner needs to be able to string together a halfway decent story.  Granted, not everyone can sequence with all of the transition words and make it work, but it's still important. Here's what I need my students who are sequencing to do: get the student to understand the sequential order (to me, pictures are the only way to do this.  Maybe text for an older student, but they would have needed the pictures as a foundation when they were younger) Be able to describe the pictures (without the "meat" of the action in each picture, what's the point?) Use transition words (first, next, last, then, after, before