As SLPs, at times we need to assist our students with work that is a bit pointless. I recall that Social Thinking® had some material about this; as students we are expected to follow the "group plan" and sometimes complete tedious tasks. Memorization of lists or passages is perhaps a good example. I recently needed to assist a student with memorizing a lengthy section from a book, I won't say which one. While the requirement was maybe in that zone of "Why tho?" it still was a good opportunity to apply Ehren's concept of the "strategic/therapeutic focus" and work on:
-ensuring comprehension of the passage as a whole and its vocabulary, sentence structure
-paraphrasing
-looking for opportunities for visualization
-noting language structure such as the flow from main idea to details in the passage, also several sentences had parallel structures that could be used as a memory trick i.e. adjective-infinitive, adjective-infinitive, adjective-infinitive.
Putting the passage in Google Docs and commenting in the sidebar with these memory tricks while discussing and eliciting paraphrasing and connections from the students made for a good teletherapy activity for a high schooler!
A quick Google search also found us this gem, which was great to leave my student with so that he could work on the actual memorization independently. Memorizer.me allows you to paste a passage or ordered list, then provides strategies and prompts to help you work on memorizing the language. For example, the website manipulates your pasted text to provide first letter or beginning of line cues.
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