Therapists and educators supporting K-12 literacy have a lot of diagnoses and labels to navigate, and some of them are controversial. In some debates, the diagnosis itself is in question; Central Auditory Processing Disorder being one example. With hyperlexia, some people suggest that there is a certain way hyperlexic people need to learn to read;…
Category: Building literacy skills
EP 70: How to make syntax instruction useful for the real world
Schools often get criticized for not teaching enough “real world” skills to kids, and there’s a lot of truth to that statement. Most of the therapists I work with are worried that what they do in therapy isn’t functional enough to transfer to day-to-day skills; and this is a legitimate concern. A lot of the…
EP 68: Why I don’t use language therapy goal banks
I get a lot of questions about how to write language therapy goals… I ALSO get a lot of questions about whether I offer goal banks in any of my courses. I do offer a version of a “goal bank” in Language Therapy Advance Foundations, my course that teaches SLPs a framework for building metalinguistic…
EP 67: Defining Vocabulary: It’s more complicated than you think
When people ask me where they should start in language therapy, I usually say they should start by building vocabulary. That usually results in a couple raised eyebrows and questions…mostly because they aren’t really sure how I’m defining “vocabulary”. That’s why in episode 67, I wanted to talk about what I actually mean when I…
EP 66: Language therapy: Managing info overload and misinformation
Back when I first started practicing, I found language therapy to be super overwhelming. There were so many peer-reviewed articles, books, and seminars, and it was hard to sift through it all and determine how to apply it to therapy. These days, we not only have to sort through lots of quality information…we have to…
EP 64: Are kids ready to work on complex sentences in early elementary school?
In episode 64 of “Are they 18 yet?”®, I share a Q & A from the Language Therapy Advance Foundations members’ group about working on complex sentences with students in early elementary school. Part of the framework I teach focuses on building skills like morphology (e.g., knowledge of word parts like prefixes & suffixes) as…
EP 63: Navigating dyslexia and working memory goals
In episode 63 of “Are they 18 yet?”®, I share a Q & A from the Language Therapy Advance Foundations members’ group about dyslexia diagnosis and treatment, as well as working memory goals. I get a lot of questions about who is qualified to diagnose and treat dyslexia; especially when it comes to the SLP’s…
EP 61: Building word-retrieval and independent word learning in K-12 kids
I get a ton of questions about how to support kids who have weak word-retrieval, so I wanted to share a powerful technique you can use to address this. When kids have poor word-finding skills, it’s often because they’re not engaging in the internal dialogue needed to pay attention to important features of words and…
EP 054: Collaboration, literacy, and surviving due process (with Joann Briggs)
In this episode of Are they 18 yet?™, I talk with my friend and former colleague, Joann Briggs. Joann was a special education teacher in the public school systems for over 30 years, and I had the opportunity to work with her for a good portion of my time as a school speech pathologist. While…
EP 046: How to support language processing and comprehension in school-age kids (part 2)
In this episode, I continue the discussion about language processing and how to support it. I continue the discussion of difficult sentence types, and dive in to one very challenging syntax skill that tends to cause processing problems. Working on this skill can not only improve language comprehension, but it can also help kids more…