Building Up Skills through the Year

It’s amazing the cumulative effect that occurs when you consistently do something a little bit at a time.  When starting out a new school year, use time to your advantage!

How?
Once you’ve scheduled your groups and identified your students’ goals, decide on a “building block” activity that you will work on each session.  This activity shouldn’t take much time, but will make a difference over the course of a year.  During each session, review the word, idiom, or skill that was introduced during the last session and then move on to the new one.

Examples of “building block” activities:
Vocabulary
Idioms:  Introduce one or two new idioms
Word meanings:  Introduce a couple of vocabulary words and their meanings
Affixes:  Introduce some prefixes, suffixes, or root words (e.g., tri=3, pre=before)

Grammar
Parts of speech:  Introduce and practice generating examples of nouns, prepositions, etc.
Fix-ups: Write sentences with errors on the board and have the students fix them and explain their corrections.

Speech
Goals:  Have students tell which goal(s) they are working on and describe strategies that help them.
Word of the week:  Give students a word or phrase to focus on producing correctly for the week.
For more information about starting off the school year right, check out a post from last year at
http://www.speechtherapyideas.com/2009/08/20/start-out-right/

Add a comment and tell us how you start out your school year or what activities you do consistently to build up skills.  We’d love to hear from you!

Becky Wanca