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 ...

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...

  Working with children with severely unintelligible children is both a challenge and a blessing.   It is pretty clear why it is a challenge, but the blessing is revealed slowly.   With every step forward for these children, you can see how the world of communication opens up. “Communication is the essence of human life”- Janice Light As SLPs, we need to help children who are severely unintelligible get closer to a goal of improved communication.   While the diagnosis of Childhood Apraxia of Speech (CAS) can get thrown around with these children, there are certainly different roads that bring us to the same destination: significant challenges with unintelligibility as well as a disability in overall communication. ASHA recommends considering augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) for children with CAS (ASHA CAS Treatment, 2017), and I would go further to say that we need to consider AAC for children with less severe diagnoses as CAS, but still with ch...

“Use your words.” To me, the most ineffective teaching method is telling a child to “use their words.” No one is innocent, and I will admit that first. I have used that prompt in the past. There are a number of reasons I feel we should be cueing our students in different ways. Students with Autism, emotional challenges, and developmental disabilities often hear these words- “use your words.” As educators, family members, and people… we can do better. For students with Autism, I see “use your words” as a problem because we are assuming something; that the student has the capability of “using their words” but isn’t. For students with emotional challenges, we are figuring that there is something that we will unlock for the child when they “use their words.” For students with developmental disabilities, we are guessing that there are words in there and that there is hope they will use them. This is not even to consider the prompt dependence that we might foster by giving...