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 well as syntax (the rules of how sentences are put together).
These skills can not only boost a student’s ability to decode what they’re reading, they can also have a positive impact on their ability to process the big picture of what they’re reading/and or writing.
I get a lot of questions about when students are “ready” for this kind of work. There’s a misconception that these skills should be reserved for “older” students in late elementary and secondary school.
That’s why in this episode, I wanted to share why waiting until students are “ready” to work on syntax is a fallacy, and what we should do instead.
I also share how to teach kids in early elementary school to use difficult sentence-types, even before they’re able to read and write difficult words or long sentences.
You can listen to the entire episode here.
This episode was taken from a Q & A session with Language Therapy Advance Foundations members. Language Therapy Advance Foundations is my course that teaches pediatric SLPs a framework for language therapy designed to give them the vocabulary and language processing skills needed to thrive in school and life.
If you’re an SLP, and you want a better system for language therapy so you can show up to sessions confident you’re setting your students up for success, check out the Language Therapy Advance Foundations enrollment page here.