Game Play Rubric

Rubrics.  When I went to ASHA this year, I went to more than one session that touted the benefit of rubrics, especially for social language.  They are a great way to target certain behaviors and make students more aware of what they are working on.

I have a group of first graders.  In my group of four first graders, I have three that have a really hard time playing games.  I knew this about most of them as individuals, but boy, the first time we tried a game together?  By halfway through the session, one student was under the table, one was yelling in the corner, and one was chatting away like nothing unusual was happening.  The remaining student was looking around the classroom, absolutely dumbstruck.  Which is probably how I was looking at that particular moment, to be honest!

So I needed a new game plan.  Luckily for me, I had just come back from ASHA, which meant that I had the idea of rubrics fresh in my head. 

You probably know how to make a rubric, but here's my method.  First, I  identify behaviors that my kids needed to work on.  Since one student started getting upset when he didn't go first, and another when he realized he had to go last, I decided turn order was going to be important.  Other issues from that fateful day included arguing with me about the rules (seriously folks, this was Chutes & Ladders), saying nice things about whoever was winning, and being a good winner/loser.

Thus, a rubric was born.  Because I have some literal thinkers and finaglers in my group, I wrote out examples of the behaviors for each value.  The student earns one point if they don't participate (because remember, we were hiding under the table or in the corner when we started), up to four points for demonstrating the target behavior.

Now, I am all about data collection, and this is ripe for data collection.  I am always jealous when the Special Education teacher can whip out some nicely made graphs of benchmarks to talk about how well Johnny is doing in reading fluency.  So I decided that I am going to have my own charts to show parents when meetings come around.  So I set up a Google Doc, and I keep a seperate page for each student.  The result? When Johnny fills in his rubric, I take a copy of it and plug my numbers in.  Google Docs automatically charts it for me, which means that I am ready to go.

This has been great to print out for parents, and an easy thing to carryover into the classroom.  I have a few paraprofessionals that know to use the rubric when they do classroom games.  It gives me great feedback as to what to target in groups, and which skills are emerging for each student.

If you have students who have similar difficulties, you can find my Game Play Rubric (and directions to download your own Google Docs data sheets) here.

Caseload vs. Workload

Oh man, where have I been?  Well, I've been a busy busy BUSY SLP!  In fact, this particular blog post has been sitting in my draft box since the ASHA convention in November!

My split this year has been between two elementary buildings.  While I love working with the K-5 kids, both caseloads have grown as the year went on.  Last year, I added only 5 kids to my caseload during the whole year at a middle school.  This year, it seems like at least 2 kids a month- in each building!

There are a few things that I attribute the growth to.  The first is a change in the district RtI process.  I've gotten more referrals for screens for kids that teachers wouldn't bring to me, since more education has been given to teachers on my role.  Good and bad, right?  The second is that we have had a lot of move-ins this year from other districts, and it seems like they all come with an IEP!

For my own sake, I started to document my time using this ASHA workload analysis sheet.  It's broken down into categories so you can determine just where your week goes.  It's really quite eye opening.  I started to track my minutes before I went to the ASHA convention in November, and have been trying to ever since.  To help my case, I went to an ASHA seminar on adopting a workload method from Laura Epstein.  It was pretty interesting. She suggested that the approach doctors use in their practice to determine practice caseload is a possibility for us.   Patient panels are the way PCP's decide how much time each patient should receive.  Basically, if you are a typical person, they assume so many doctor visits a year at a certain time value, based on your age and health.  Additionally, they use EBP to determine treatment times based on diagnoses.  Strep throat may be one visit for 15 minutes, while something else could be 15 minutes x 6 weeks of follow ups.  

This website has a pretty good explanation if you are curious. 

So what do they recommend you do if you feel absolutely overwhelmed?  Aside from retail therapy (guilty!), there are some more productive ways to work on alleviating the stress and advocating for yourself.


1. Chart your workload for a month. Ms. Epstein recommended calculating the percent of your week spent in each activity.  For those who don't remember how to do that, convert the time that you are contracted to be in the building to minutes, multiply by 5 for the 5 days a week. Then add the minutes you are spending in each activity for the week and divide that by the total minutes.  (e.g. if I am contracted to be in the building for 2250 minutes a week, and I spend 980 minutes in a week doing direct therapy, then I know that 43% of my week was spent directly giving therapy).  Don't forget to include things like lunch and plan time if they are in your contract.  You can calculate the percentage of your week that *should* be spent in those activities, and then you know if you are hitting that goal each week (I would love to meet a related service person who is!).  The ASHA Workload Analysis Survey that I linked to above is really helpful in this endeavor.

2. Look at your student population.  Kids who stutter may be a heavy time investment initially, but theoretically, as they move to the maintenance phase there is less of a time investment with them. Same with articulation.  However, if you have a caseload that is heavily language based, your "invested time" might start high and stay high.  Ms. Epstein recommended that as a practice, we start to derive a more formulaic approach to this, but thinking about my caseload, I'm not entirely sure how that would even work.

3. Ms. Epstein also recommended comparing your district to others in regards to prevalence of disabilities. In other words, what does your caseload look like compared to districts around you? Are you over identifying students?  This one can be tricky, I think, because I know some districts are "magnet" districts for certain disabilities, and people move to the district because they want the services provided by the district.

4. If you want to really go the extra mile and make your case, ASHA also offers other workload analysis sheets to really break down the time you are spending on activities, as well as the time you NEED to spend on those activities.  They also have some great examples and templates for you to use to really paint a picture for your administrators.  

5. Look at what your state has to say.  Some states have set certain guidelines, and there are a few districts that have adopted a workload model.  In my case, the guidelines are pretty general.  I can't have a caseload of more than 60 students, but that does not pertain to my workload. 

It can be frustrating when you feel like your workload is not manageable, and typically, you are not the only one a district to feel that way.  While it can be tedious to track your minutes on a daily basis, I truly do recommend it.  If for no other reason than to see just how your days look.  I know some days the final bell rings and I wonder what happened to the day!

How about you? Does anyone work in a district where caseload is not the driving factor in your assignments?  How did your district transition to a workload model, and what does that look like for you?  I'd love to hear about it!  Or if you are like me, and trying to collect the data you need to advocate for yourself, do you have any additional recommendations?

More Inferring Activities: Print Ads

I've mentioned before about using visuals like comics and TV commercials to help my students who work on inferring information, figurative language, and visual humor.  Let me share with you another resource I've been using: I created a Pinterest board using print ads.

As with anything Pinterest related, it is a work in progress.  I usually take about 4-5 to work on in a session, throw them on powerpoint slides, and then crop out or cover what is being advertised using a filled in text box (always have a 2nd picture to show them whether their guesses were right!  My students love to guess what the ad might be about, and I usually get a lot of language while they are hypothesizing.  It also tells me a lot about their areas of knowledge, as some kids really lack a point of reference for some of the ads.

Next year, I am looking for more carryover activities for home to start with my students.  I am thinking a few small books of advertisements for some of my students that are working on inferring might be a great place to start.  I'll let you know when I get on the ball with that!  ;)

A little bit of structure going a long way

Oh boy! A whole month has FLOWN by!  Somewhere in there, I had Spring Break, which was lovely, 10 IEPs, and LOTS of evaluations.  The weather here has been vacillating between beautiful sunny days and dreary cold rain, which hasn't been very inspiring, and the caseload at my PRN position has been high, so I am spending more time there after school.  Busy busy busy!

With all the testing and the meetings and the end of the year fast approaching, I feel like I have spent much of my time putting out fires.  You know, the student who holds a sit-in in the office because he just doesn't want to be in class today? The student who has been doing fine all year at the end of the day, but suddenly starts having meltdowns about cleaning up and packing up?  My world has been filled with social stories on the go, and attempts at problem solving to figure out why things are the way they are, and what to do next. Most of the changes are relatively small, and usually involve changing the environment and adding just a touch more structure.

Here's what I whipped up today for a student who is struggling with the end of the day.  Last week, we added in a break after cleaning up so that he had the opportunity to unwind a bit.  That helped some, but when I observed him, I saw that he was using his time inefficiently. While many of his classmates made only 1 trip to get their coat and backpack, he made two.  And three trips to his mailbox!  So it seemed like a bigger task because he was doing so much more work!  Enter his end of the day checklist.  For most of us in speech, visual aids are second nature, so this is probably nothing new.  But I always like to see how people are using things in the real world, so I thought I would share. 

Given that it's the end of the day, I didn't want something that he had to write, because his pencil pouch should be away.  However, since I love the feeling of getting to check something off a list, and only imagine that others feel the same, I did want to give him the satisfaction of "crossing something off", which explains the flaps.

As you might have gathered, he's a big fan of a certain web-slinging superhero. 

I started by taking pictures of his afternoon routine.  Then, using powerpoint, I put all the pictures into a table, and added some words at the top (mostly so an adult can prompt him if necessary).  While he can read more than he realizes, written words often increase his frustration, so I wanted him to be able to rely on pictures.  I made another sheet with some webs and Spiderman, so he is motivated to flip down the flaps.  I laminated it.  When he completes a task, the flap comes down and is secured with velcro.

I tried it this afternoon, and it was great! He was the model student- referring to the pictures, doing what he needed to, and then flipping it down all by himself.  He was one of the first to sit back down on the carpet, which is HUGE when you consider that last week, he was 10-15 minutes late getting picked up because he was struggling so much.  Here's hoping that the trend continues.

What I really love is that adding a little bit of structure (in this case, a short break in preparation for a transition and a visual checklist) not only makes things run a bit more smoothly, but it increases the student's ability to be independent and successful, which can be a huge confidence builder. Now that he's learned how to use it, I asked the teacher to just make sure it is on his desk every afternoon so he can start with it (it lives in his seat sack during the day).

I am always on the lookout for different ideas.  What do your visual checklists look like? How do you help with transitions, or dealing with activities/transitions that may be challenging for a student?

Bucket o'Beans

When I was in graduate school, we had two Rubbermaids filled with beans. I had one client who LOVED them, and we used it weekly in some fashion.

I was at the dollar store this weekend, and had the sudden inspiration to make one for my students.  The card games have been fun, but some of my students have a hard time staying engaged for another card game.

I knew this week would be a perfect debut for something different. My students had a four day weekend, it's the coldest it's been in two years, and we can't do outdoor recess due to the cold
. 

I obviously do a better job of hiding them in real life! :)

 
My first group is fourth graders, working on language goals, including vocabulary.  I pulled out Live Love Speech's Snowy Synonyms, and pre-matched them in sets of 6.  Each student had 1 minute to find all six words in the beans and figure out the synonym pairs.  This particular group isn't made of strong readers, so it took some time for them to decode the words.  Overall, it was a pretty tricky challenge for them.  But boy, did they love it.

Thanks to Jenna at Speech Room News, I had a great countdown timer that added to the suspense.

My next group was a group of 5th graders who all work on /s/.  I buried 20 words to start, which were part of artic bingo games that were left to me by the SLP who retired a few years ago.  Each student had 1 minute to find & say as many of the words as they could.  Challenge accepted!  After the first round, they had another chance to beat their own score, and I added a few more cards.  My record for the group was 23. They loved it!  Up next were another artic group of 3rd graders with different sounds. Thanks to my Bingo cards, switching out the target sounds was easy.  While I was resetting, those that were working on phrases or sentences had to choose some of the words they found to use in a sentence.

My fifth grader was my victory, though. He has more than one goal area. When we usually try to work on straight up articulation, he uses a monotone voice, and tells me, "I have to be bored to work on my sounds. So I'll be bored now."  Um, not what you want to hear.  We started with 24 cards buried. On his first round, he got 9. When he heard the record for the day was 23, he bucked up.  His second attempt got 16 productions. Then 20, then 21, and then, finally, he got all 24.  That's 90 productions of the target sound when getting 10 productions most days is pulling teeth!

Needless to say, I was feeling pretty good, and it wasn't even 10AM.  Easy, cheap, and flexible? That's a therapy material I can get behind!

Here's how to make your own bucket:
1 Rubbermaid container, shoebox size or larger (I got mine at the Dollar Tree)
A total of about 6-8 lbs of dried beans, noodles, split peas and/or rice

Because it's flu season, I do have all my students use Purell before dipping their hands in the beans.  I also make them promise to not spill beans all over the place if they want to be able to keep using it. So far, they have been pretty good about it.

I can't wait to find more ways to use my bucket in speech! 

Pickles to Penguins game

My husband and I have some friends that we've known since college, and we get together with about once a month.  Usually, they come visit for a weekend, and we pretty much spend the weekend playing board games.  Yep, a full weekend of board games, party games, and card games.  I'm talking about Risk, Scattegories, and less well known games like Dominion, Pandemic, and Ticket to Ride.

You can imagine that holidays are a chance to give and get new games for our group.  Most games aren't appropriate for therapy, or would take WAY too long to setup/play during a school therapy session.

So, imagine how excited I was when a game that we bought for my friends turned out to be a perfect game for SLPs.

I present to you:

Pickles to Penguins picture from Amazon.com

The game is terribly simple.  The deck is a series of double sided labeled photographs (are we not excited, SLPs?).  Each player gets a certain number of cards, and place 5 out, either side up.  Two cards get placed in the middle of the table, and players attempt to unload the cards from their smaller decks onto the middle decks by using COMPLETE SENTENCES to explain how the card from the middle and the card they are playing are related.

So, I might say the Airplane and the Stove (from my hand) are both made of metal. And someone else might say that they cook with the frying pan on the stove for the next card/point.

Here's a video to help make my point:

It's a pretty fast-paced game, and probably took us less than 3 minutes for 3 players. But of course, I would imagine it to take a bit longer with students. 

I really like that the cards are photographs and labeled.  Imagine other uses:
- Category naming
-Sentence building
-Labeling
-Describing (a la Headbanz)


 Have you used Pickles to Penguins in therapy or a game that is similar? 


*For the record, I am getting nothing for this post.  I just happened to think it was a neato game that will now be on my wish list.

Materials Freebie: Snowy Speech Packet

Does anyone else have progress reports due the week you get back?  Between that and 8 IEP meetings on the 14th, I needed a little something to help transition the kids back and make my planning a little easier.

I was inspired by Sublime Speech's Halloween packet.  Since using them back in October, my students have been asking for another packet.  Well, ask, and they shall receive!

Enter the Snowy Speech Packet, which is a new freebie I whipped up for articulation kiddos.  Word lists are included for /s/, /r/, /l/, "th", "sh"/"ch"/"j"



I love packets like this because I can use them in stations while I work with 1 student one on one with my older students.  The students love them because it lets them get creative, and they love being able to share their pictures.  Plus, taking them home and sharing them with family is great practice!

The first activity is using the word lists to develop a story.
 
The students then come up with their own spell to chant for a snow day (boy, my students want a snow day so badly! They started asking in November!)

Next, the students use 3 words from their lists to draw a winter scene.

After that, they use 6 words and put them in sentences.


Last, but not least, they try to come up with 3 more winter words with their target sound.



You can grab it at my TpT store.  Because the idea was so heavily influenced by Danielle at Sublime Speech, this product will remain free.  I just ask that you please leave feedback if you download it.