I had a powerful insight several years ago that changed everything about the way I do speech and language therapy as a speech-language pathologist.
I was observing an elementary reading group led by a consulting SLP at the school where I was working. The consultant had chosen a peculiar article along with some thought-provoking questions, which inspired some interesting discussion among the students. These young, language-impaired kids were doing all the things an SLP dreams of: giving genuine opinions on something they had read and using language to exchange their ideas with their peers!
What is the relationship between thinking and language? Language is the interface!
At that moment, I was struck by the idea that language was acting as the interface in a complex mechanism: the students were thinking about the information in the written language they were reading, using language frameworks to guide their critical thinking about what they were reading, and then using oral language to express their unique thoughts, opinions, and perspectives about what they were reading.
As a language nerd who learned about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and linguistic relativity in college (a theory about the degree to which the language we speak can dictate what we can think about and express), I have long wondered how powerful linguistic relativity truly is, and what exactly the relationship is between language and thinking.
Though I don't think we'll ever know the extent of linguistic relativity, I've landed on the pretty safe bet that we can use language to organize and express our thoughts and that the production of original (I'm looking at you, ChatGPT) and complex language reflects original and complex thinking.
So, since my insight that day in the reading group, I've been particularly interested in moving beyond typically boring and superficial IEP goals to incorporating several meaningful components into my therapy:
using material my students find interesting and compelling - be it funny, weird, or relatable
encouraging my students to become familiar with a variety of common critical thinking frameworks (main idea & supporting details, categories, cause & effect, compare/contrast, problem & solutions, and timelines) and the language that signals these frameworks and allows us to use them
encouraging my students to use complex sentences so they can explain what they're thinking
encouraging my students to think and talk - a.k.a., "get meta" - about language
I created StoryWhys Comprehensive Book Companions to incorporate these components into my speech and language therapy and I am so happy to share them with other SLPs!
StoryWhys book companions harness the power of repetitive use of a small set of graphic organizers to develop elementary students' critical thinking and higher-level language development. They are based on high-quality, beloved storybooks that my students find compelling and thought-provoking, like Those Darn Squirrels, A Bad Case of Stripes, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, Miss Nelson is Missing, Creepy Carrots, and many more.
Try the free, 71-page book companion for the storybook The Big Orange Splot here, or on the free downloads page.
LEVEL UP YOUR SPEECH THERAPY ACTIVITIES WITH STORYWHYS
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Have you heard? StoryWhys now offers the Speech and Spell series of resources. I am always trying to tie articulation work and spelling together in my therapy and I've never found any good resources out there to help me do this. So I made my own! Many more speech sounds and spelling rules to come. They'll be 50% off for 48 hrs when new resources are added to the StoryWhys store. Find them here.
Did you know book companions can be among the best speech therapy materials for elementary students? Explore all of the StoryWhys book companions for speech therapy in the store. You'll find comprehensive book companions that target many different language skills or Spotlight Series book companions that focus on one type of skill, all using high-quality, beloved storybooks.
And get your FREE, 71-page book companion for speech therapy, plus many more useful tools on the Free Downloads page.
Enjoy!
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