I'm sick of talking about COVID. Obvi it's still with us, but I thought I'd frame the path forward instead of backward, and 6 parts of "Lessons from COVID" was enough anyway. A new school year, so Consider This. In coming posts I will be encouraging flexible thinking, planning, and contextualizing of language interventions fostered by simple tech resources.
I'm still a working clinician of course but have the privilege of doing consulting as well. This week I was discussing with an amazing SLP colleague a "way forward" for social learning lessons for a group of moderate to high-support high-schoolers. With delivery in their dedicated classroom, use of the board and projector is really helpful for keeping up engagement. We had at our fingertips a book she had identified, 125 True Stories of Amazing Animal Friendships, a great visual resource from National Geographic.
Interactive read-alouds, though still effective, get tougher as students get older. They no longer gather around in a circle on the carpet, do they? We thought of digitizing through Slides (easy enough, and one option), but then I thought to check EPIC! It had the book! Hopefully you know this repository of digital books offers (still!) free accounts to educators. Consider also this entire publisher's library and other visual treasures, which help us see how a resource like this can be useful beyond the primary grades.
Yes, you can zoom in...
So Consider This, in brief, and comment with other thoughts, please!
-Each entry, and there are many, can be mapped as a narrative
-The book as a whole is also an expository example and graphic organizers can be used for list, sequence, cause-effect etc.
-Our primary interest here was social "same but different" thinking. Many of these episodes can be used to extract human friendship "hidden rules"
-Conversation building: what connections can you make in your experiences with pets?
-EPIC is very vocab-friendly. Click on a word and you get a definition.
What other ideas do you have when you Consider This?
Recently I was trying to get a copy of a book, Sally Gets A Job, that would align with a vocabulary set from one of my favorite apps, WWP-Vocabulary. The set featured good Tier-2 words such as skill, operate, career, successful, earn. Sally, dog hero of one of my favorite series, seemed a great match.
A quick search on Boston Public Library's website revealed that the book was right at my fingertips, free, via their connection to Hoopla, an electronic media service. Hoopla allows you to view books on a laptop or your iPad after signing in through your public library, if this service is offered to you locally.
So, this is just a suggestion to check out your library website's resources for picture book therapy materials. They may vary, of course (mine has connections to lots of picture and other books through Overdrive, but not Tumblebooks, which you may have), but probably offer you some great options of free materials!
Also, don't forget, EPIC! Books for Kids has scads of picture books, free for educators.
In the last post, I talked about how context can be your friend, not only in planning activities and engaging students, but also clinically. Incorporating curriculum topics is a key strategy for clinicians, but we need not be arbitrary about it. Please take these examples of contextual work as exactly that- examples. You can find out from teachers what they are working on and perhaps offer students a choice of topics to "roll with," especially if you are working on social objectives.
One tool I use frequently when making decisions as a group is the Levels of Like chart, a strategy I learned about from SLP Jenny Sojat. You can make one of these on a board to explore sample topics; it's also a good way to use Pic Collage:
Use Text tool to add the levels. Use the Web Image tool to search for images related to options being discussed. Poll students on their "thoughts" (good entry to perspective taking) and where each option lies. Try not to decide on something that anyone has below the OK level.
Let's say you explore pets as a topic. Pets are a nice entry point to curriculum as they relate to social studies (human interaction with environment, etc) and a number of science topics such as describing animal features, habitats etc. Some examples if you settle on, say, cats. Cats are cool!
Memes: A meme is, in internet parlance, something that is shared, often for humor. Memes are essentially narratives and often take on a "same but different" theme with different versions of a meme. But animal memes are usually a story, so think narrative language. Be careful where you get your memes; you can save images from icanhazcheeseburger, find cute groups related to animals on Facebook, or search for kid-friendly memes. You can organize them for presentation in a Google Slides format like I did below:
Note that each one is a (partial) story involving observation and prediction.
Character: owner and cat
Setting: bathtub
Initiating event: The owner is taking a bath WHEN the cat comes to visit and perch on the faucet
Sequential events/reactions: you guess
Also a good figurative language term in slide 1.
Books: Pets feature in a ton of narrative/expository picture books. Try Creature Features or It's all about ME-ow, which have science and social extensions.
Apps: Lots of apps revolve around pets. Many are not great! But check out Toca Life: Pets to tell stories and play (also great for categories/following directions), and apps like How to Draw a Cat Step By Step are good contexts for following directions.
Videos: Phrasal Verbs Friends is a series of fun cat vids teaching about Phrasal Verbs (basically figurative language). Thanks FreeTech4Teachers for that suggestion. Also see the Simon's Cat series for wordless narratives.
More Academic: see what BrainPop, NewsELA or EPIC! Books have for material on cats and teach expository text structures and strategies.
WWF Free Rivers app (free, in another sense, for iOS and also Android devices) provides a cool, "immersive" experience where students can view a river and its effects on the landscape, weather, animals and people around it. The app uses augmented reality technology, overlaying a riverscape and also a world map over your teaching space (e.g. a floor or table). It is extremely easy to navigate and provides student-friendly language (and audio) about the water cycle, where you can make it rain and view above and below the clouds, the cause-effect of damming a river, and other material presented in a storytelling format. The app would be great for providing visual support and engagement in language such as:
-geographic features and landforms/continents (language/categories of social studies)
-weather processes (language/sequences of science)
-expository text structures such as cause-effect
-simpler observative social processes such as "thinking with the eyes" and "making a smart guess" (see work of social thinking)
Be sure to install this free app on your iPad for the upcoming school year- you'll surely find a context to use it in syncing with classroom curriculum!
Some years ago at the ASHA Convention, I saw in the program a poster entitled "A Cat In Therapy: Cute, but Effective?" I thought this title intriguing and at the same time, funny, and I was sad to have not been able to locate the poster. Fiete Cats AR ($1.99) gives you the opportunity to test this proposition out. AR--Augmented Reality-- is technology that overlays digital content over our world, often through the camera. In this case, the app makes a cat appear in any room, including your treatment space, and offers a number of interactions:
-Name up to 3 cats
-Observe the cat's needs (think with your eyes)
-Pet and play with the cat
-Feed it when it gets dirty (from playing in paint)
-Provide him food and drink when hungry/thirsty
-Put him to bed
-Record your interactions to make a short movie (saves to Photos app)
My kitty using his litter box ON MY RUG! Oh, NO!
Effective? Well, for sure the app is engaging, and provides a context for social observation, labeling actions, and using cause-effect and conditional structures.
This app is also a great pairing with picture books (narrative or expository) about cats. Consider making your own "picture book" with Book Creator, which would allow you to import screenshots or the videos recorded within the app. Students can write about their interactions with the cat, a context for any number of objectives.
ASHA Convention was quite a production in Los Angeles this past week. I wanted to share a few snippets from my own presentations as well as some tech tie-ins from others', so I will be posting those over the next week or so.
My session Setting up the Sequel: Pairing Picture Book Series & Apps to Contextually Address Language Objectives focused on using picture book series along with apps for pre- or post-book activities. One key idea is that we can use narrative teaching strategies and other language scaffolds in the process of using both books and apps.
I presented some ideas about working in context within interventions, including the following:
Context allows for easier planning and semantically/narratively deeper intervention.
Contextualized language intervention is supported by studies such as (Gillam et al, 2012): “signs of efficacy in an intervention approach in which clinicians treated multiple linguistic targets using meaningful activities with high levels of topic continuity.”
SLPs should maintain “therapeutic focus” (build skills and strategies) within meaningful context- book series are one way to approach this (Ukrainetz, 2007, Ehren, 2000).
We can analyze series for characteristics between books (or apps) that lend themselves to language interventions.
One series I reviewed was the Sally sequels (by Huneck, available with your free educator account in the app/website Epic! Books for Kids. The "Speechie" characteristics of this series include that they are simple narrative action sequences that can also be told at higher levels of narrative (see stage model in this article and this figure), they include many different settings, figurative language, and opportunities to scaffold cognitive verbs--Sally the dog "thinks about" many different things, decides, realizes, discovers and so on. Books like these that give many openings to language elicitation--where the illustration might prompt more verbalization to go beyond what the text states--are also good therapy tools. In the same way, apps that have language-neutral visuals without a lot of talking or noise are good candidates for our use. Take the Toca Life series (with a Farm, Vacation, School, Office, City and Town, Stable and Hospital) as one that has embedded language opportunities with categories in each scene, opportunities to demonstrate actions and create stories.
Toca Life: City pairs well with Sally Discovers New York (Huneck)
An additional main point of this session is that stories can be told in many different ways (see the developmental sequence link above) and found almost anywhere. Since we were in Hollywood and talking sequels I provided a tie-in to "bad" sequels and analyzed them with different narrative forms. Check out this "climactic" (strangely boring and seeming to affect only the 10 people they cast in the film) clip from Speed 2, and an analysis via Story Grammar Marker's 6 Second Story™, which we can use to scaffold a kernel of conversation:
Consider therefore how we can use different levels of narrative development to scaffold elaboration using fun and motivating contexts such as film clips as well.
Gillam, S. L., Gillam, R. B., Reece, K., Nippold, M., & Schneider, P. (2012). Language Outcomes of Contextualized and Decontextualized Language Intervention: Results of an Early Efficacy Study. Language, Speech & Hearing Services In Schools, 43(3), 276-291. doi:10.1044/0161-1461(2011/11-0022)
Ukrainetz, T. A. (2007). Contextualized language intervention: Scaffolding PreK-12 literacy achievement. Pro-ed.
Ehren, B. J. (2000). Maintaining a Therapeutic Focus and Sharing Responsibility for Student Success: Keys to In-Classroom Speech-Language Services. Language, Speech & Hearing Services In Schools, 31(3), 219-229. doi: 10.1044/0161-1461.3103.219.
Video versions of ads can be motivating ways to target students' understanding of narrative and expository text structures. I have recently enjoyed the series from Amazon Prime in which people solve animal-related problems. Here's one featuring an adorable little horse:
As the ads are wordless, they offer an opportunity to work on student narration and also interpretation of nonverbal information.
Westby and Culatta's recently published article "Telling Tales" offers a tutorial on assessing and intervening on narrative skills (primarily personal rather than fictional), and as you know I am a big fan of (and consultant for) Story Grammar Marker® to break down and produce narrative material. I also highly recommend Dr. Anna Vagin's books (and mailing list) for terrific information on how to use video to target narrative and social cognition skills.
I have been meaning to write about this app for some time, but it is free today (5/6/16) and fairly priced at $2.99 anyway, so pick it up! Thank you to Smart Apps for Kids for always being a great resource. Do you follow their Friday posts detailing app sales and freebies? There is a "Free App Alert" you can subscribe to on the site. The website is also a wealth of information on interactive apps, with many features on apps from an educational and therapeutic point of view-- very FIVES Criteria-friendly!
MarcoPolo's apps, such as their previous wonderful Weather entry, are "sandbox" apps encouraging interactive exploration and play within a context, specifically geared toward STEM education. However, being quite language-neutral, the visuals provide a great avenue for talk, description of items and actions, and causal and conditional language. Overall the apps can be used for developing descriptive schema (perhaps with the use of the Expanding Expression Tool) or expository text structures as well (e.g. list, sequence, cause-effect, compare-contrast) as post-activities.
Arctic (please click through to download from Smart Apps for Kids and support them) provides an interactive land-sea environment allowing you to insert and name species in different categories and interact with them (e.g. feeding). Students can also observe their behaviors as they are placed in the arctic habitat. The app also features puzzles that provide brief auditory narrations (ask wh-questions or prompt students to summarize) focusing on categories such as land animals or birds, describe body parts and functions. The app can also be paired with many books as a post-book activity (e.g. Winston of Churchill or The Emperor's Egg).
The iPad is such an engaging gadget that we sometimes can be too focused on its screen--kids especially. For this reason, it is helpful to locate apps that provide context or creation, but let us break away from the screen to focus on the communication and learning aspects of the activity.
Dr. Pet Play by Pretendasaurus is an app that supports just that kind of context, turning the iPad into a pretend "medical device" that can be used in a play-based interaction with children. Just add a stuffed animal and the screens of the can be used to prompt questions and record answers given in play between kids, as in the video below.
The "examination" can be used to target many language concepts and vocabulary including feelings, body parts, gender, age, weight, and action words, as well as pronouns:
The app includes some fantastic interactive elements such as the ability to activate the camera and snap an image of the "patient," annotate the "X-Ray," and scan and control heart rate and temperature.
Language Lens:
-In addition to concepts and vocabulary, interactions using the app could be used along with Braidy, The Storybraid or Story Grammar Marker® to have students tell stories about why they came to the vet that day.
-To add more context and sequential/causal language, including "treatments," other props might be helpful. I have (and love) the Pretend and Play Vet Set.
-Interactions around the app can support social development, including Social Thinking's® concept of "sharing an imagination," important across all age levels.
This app can be downloaded in its free version, which has only a template for a cat, or the full version ($2.99), which has templates for 10 animals (chiefly different in the X-Ray image and the prompted questions).
So try Dr. Pet Play and take your kids way beyond the screen!
Disclosure: author is a consultant for provision of blog content to Mindwing Concepts, Inc, creators of Story Grammar Marker and Braidy the Storybraid.
Pepi Tree (free Lite version available, full version $1.99) is a fun little app presenting "mini-games" at different levels of a tree, all illustrating in some way the life and "work" of animals in the forest. Mini-games are an interesting concept for therapy, as they can be used as different contexts for concepts, language structure and vocabulary development within the same app. For example, within this app, the caterpillar mini-game can be used to target sequential words (the caterpillar eats a leaf, then goes into a cocoon, and finally becomes a butterfly) as well as some/all (he needs to eat all of the leaf before going into the cocoon). There is also a fox-feeding activity that can be used to address negative words (the foxes don't like all the food) and one emphasizing the curriculum concepts around what plants need to grow. It's definitely worth grabbing the Lite version for your young students and deciding if you'd like all the games in the full version.
AR Flashcards-Animal Alphabet ($.99, iPhone/iPad) is another marker-based fun AR visual. After downloading the app, navigate to the website provided to download the animal alphabet flashcards at no additional charge. When printed, they show a 3D animal when viewed within the app.
The animals provided here could be used to target letter-sound relationships or categories- sort by farm, pet, forest animal or whatever! As a followup, you can make other alphabet cards for other categories using Aurasma! Common Core Connection:
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.1.5a Sort words into categories (e.g., colors, clothing) to gain a sense of the concepts the categories represent.
The Fotopedia series of apps (free) is a terrific resource for eliciting language through visual exploration and connecting to curriculum topics. There are apps on China, UNESCO World Heritage sites, US National Parks, and wild animals, topics frequently covered in the classroom. Through rich, detailed photographs often linked to maps, along with informational text available for each picture, you can target categories and descriptive and expository language. The Wild Friends app is one that could be used for picture stimuli if you are working through the Visualizing and Verbalizing program.
Common Core Connection:
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.SL.4.1d Review the key ideas expressed and explain their own ideas and understanding in light of the discussion.
Though released to coincide with the 2012 Summer Olympics, and with a bit of a British feel, Zoo Champs ($1.99) is an interactive book that transcends seasons to grab the attention of any of your sports-interested learners (and probably those who are not!). Adorable graphics and animations, along with audio-supported text will allow you to explore categories, verbs, sequences and informational text with all kinds of learners. Try acting out some of the sports "events" (except maybe synchronized swimming) for pragmatic and movement activities.
Common Core Connection:
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.2.1 Ask and answer such questions as who, what, where, when, why, and how to demonstrate understanding of key details in a text.
Initially, I was myself skeptical about the potential of e-books, because I actually really appreciate the value of traditional paper, particularly picture books, in therapy activities. However, I think iBooks is worth SLPs' time for a few reasons:
Books published through the iTunes store (there are many free books there as well) are becoming more interactive and therefore offer great opportunities for describing 3D pictures, completing tap-and-drag activities that can be used to target sorting, sequencing, and cause-effect, and narrating or discussing video clips.
iBooks can be used to access ePub books, the format of most downloadable books, which are themselves interactive in navigation via the use of tappable tables of contents. Additionally, when words are tapped/held in ePub books, the menu allows you to access a word definition, annotate via highlighting and notes, and activating text-to-speech, which has potential for targeting auditory comprehension as well as making material more accessible to struggling readers. You can see a good tutorial on the Speak Selection feature here from OTs with Apps.
iBooks can also be used to save and display PDF files such as those that come on the CD-ROMs accompanying some commercial materials, but more on this in the next post!
Presenting information through the glowy loveliness of the iPad can really grab students' attention and engage them even in less-than-fascinating material that is necessary for you to cover.
For a great example of a simpler iBook that could be used in speech-language sessions, check out Snapshot Picture Library's Baby Animals. This book has adorable photographs of a variety of young animals and could be used to target descriptive skills, understanding of cause-effect relationships, and text structure. For example, the book contains lists (enumeration-a key text structure, essentially abstract categorization you can teach through use of graphic organizers) of how different animals are born, how they protect themselves, and their native geographic habitats. This book would be a great choice for primary grades.
Thanks to a tweet today by Tony Vincent, I discovered another great series of iBooks that can be used to target language within the context of content material: ScienceWerkz. ScienceWerkz publishes fun, magazine-style eBooks with interactive features and video. Our World of Materials is free, and other books in the series such as Energy, Cells and Heat are currently on sale for $.99, a good buy if you work with upper elementary or middle school students.
Here's a nice video walkthrough of Our World of Materials. Check out that Clothing Materials interactive! I didn't know eBooks could function like interactive websites! In the embedded interactive, students can choose to clothe characters in different types of materials, including metal, and see the resulting effect, providing a great opportunity to elicit causal and descriptive language in context.
I will be discussing the connection between iBooks and PDFs in a future post.
How are you using the iBooks app in your work? Let us know in the comments!
Here's a great wordless narrative video for you! Have your students provide the words...Probably it would be best for older kids given the quick underwear scene, but use your best judgement. Happy story mapping!
This post continues Animonths, a two-month focus on animation resources on SpeechTechie. Shaun the Sheep is a terrific series from Aardman Animation, the UK studio that brought us Wallace and Gromit, among other gems. Their productions are great resources for targeting language because they are mostly wordless, providing an opportunity for kids to talk out the story. In addition, the large eyes and faces of the characters, plus the fact that the stories are really told through nonverbal actions, let us target inferential, nonverbal and social reasoning in a context that is funny and motivating for kids (Michelle Garcia Winner of Social Thinking™often recommends Wallace and Gromit for lessons on "thinking with your eyes" to search for nonverbal clues).
Shaun the Sheep, a series of animated shorts depicting the humorous events on a British farm, is pretty much entirely wordless. Each episode therefore is a wealth of inferential talking points about what the characters see, know, think, guess, plan, and on and on... Shaun is available on DVD (and you can find some copyright-violating clips on YouTube but I didn't say so, and don't count on them being there when you go back to find them), but can also be accessed by your laptop or iPad if you have a worthwhile ($7.99 monthly in US) Netflix streaming account. Each Shawn episode--they have 2 seasons in one collection on Netflix-- is broken up into three 6-minute stories, many of which would make a great language lesson. If you watch a 6-minute clip with your group, kids can usually tolerate/benefit from 1 or 2 stopping points for discussion and summarization, and then you can complete a story map or other post-activity.
You'll have to explore for yourself, but two starting clips I can recommend:
Season 1, Episode 1: The Bull- Shaun inadvertently angers the local bull, and his issues with the herd are complicated when the pigs play a plank and add some bull-maddening red paint to the situation.
Season 2, Episode 2: In the Doghouse- A passing truck ejects a grossly messy sheep who, when bathed, turns out to be a love match for Shaun. Shaun and his love interest attempt to evade the rest of the herd to get just a little time together, and finally all conspire to keep her from being returned home.
The context of Shaun can be extended toward a nice cooperative group problem solving and verbal reasoning activity with the use of the Home Sheep Home free animated webgame or iPhone/iPad app ($.99, there is also a Part 2). This game has 20 levels, though you may just want to try a few, across which your students can work together to figure out which objects, actions, and sequence therein are required to get the three sheep past a given obstacle. The game is slow-paced, and though a timer is displayed on screen there is no time limit. It is conducive to turn-taking as on each level, kids could play the role of a particular sheep or however you help them structure it. Lots of great causal and conditional language can be elicited as you verbally plan and review strategies!
I love resources that provide enough material to allow for repetition of activities- our kids benefit not only from trying things more than once but also from generalizing to other contexts. When a topic is real-life and relatable to curriculum, even better! Take the topic of animal habitats- how "Speechie" is it? Well, habitats can be described in detail, visualized, have different categories of animals living in them, experience cycles/sequences based on weather and climate, and of course the relationship between animals and habitats is linked to cause and effect and conditional language (if something changed in the habitat, then...)
Draw that Habitat! has its own art pad (which is Flash-based, so non-iPad friendly) for kids to draw the picture and submit after you create an account. Submitting provides the extra rationale of "publishing" one's work, often powerfully motivating, but you will probably have to set realistic expectations about work being recognized by the site (I have no idea how many submissions they get).
The other aspect of Draw that Habitat that makes this a great Project-Based or Theme-Based Learning kind of site is that previous months' animals and habitats are featured on the Gallery page. This provides a great resource to set the context and provide examples for students. You can use the examples for picture description activities, read the rationales for why the examples were chosen for the animal, and even have the kids evaluate and "rate" the submitted drawings. So many language opportunities! You could also use previous animal descriptions (the "About this Animal") for additional practice in constructing habitats.
Although you cannot use the site's art pad and submit for previous months' animals, this is a good place to use traditional drawing materials or an app such as Doodle Buddy.
Sensory Garden is one of those great resources you can return to for many thematic lessons, with countless opportunities to model and elicit a skill. This interactive website presents you with a garden scene that changes across all 4 seasons, with each season providing different activities. In the "Activities," um, activity, students are tasked to find all the actions one can do in the garden. When they do so, they are shown an animation of the action:
The garden also has My Garden and Explore modes where students can build the garden with items from different categories and view the sensory (5 senses-related) experiences in the garden, respectively.
Language Lens:
The Activities mode is a great context to model verbs, temporals and causal constructions: "The lawn needs mowing BECAUSE the grass is long!"
By building their own garden, students will practice using categories and descriptive skills, and perhaps explaining why they made certain choices.
The site is an engaging way to reinforce abstract curriculum around months, seasons, and the 5 Senses.
This site IS NOT iPad-friendly as it is flash-based.
A Touch of Class is a simple, fun game challenging students to classify animals according to specific characteristics:
A little robot runs through after you make your choices, awarding or subtracting points based on what you missed. This activity will create a lot of discussion and suspense, aligning well with curriculum topics and strategies around descriptive schema.
Thanks, Moms with Apps and App Friday- Peekaboo Wild is an adorable animated app you can use to explore the category of wild animals, their sounds, verbs associated with the animations, and printed names of the animals, as well as cause-effect. Peekaboo Wild is normally $1.99 (like its siblings Peekaboo Forest and Barn) but is $.99 today on the iTunes App Store.
SpeechTechie is my take on simple and interactive technologies you can use in language lessons and interventions. Enjoy!
Interested in learning more? I am available to conduct professional development sessions, including via webinar. If you'd like to work with me to design a presentation or consultation for your school or organization, please check out the "Work with Sean" page on this website.
Sean is a MedBridge instructor for several courses (avail. Feb 2018). Click to join MedBridge at a discounted rate for high-quality online PD and CEUs. A wide variety of courses are available for SLPs.
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