Therapist or Tutor?
I recieved the following message last night from a friend: "Do you find it difficult to work with this age group? Sometimes I find myself doing more tutoring work than actually providing therapy that I was taught to do in graduate school #frustratedSLP"
Girlfriend, I feel you. It's something I've gone back and forth about SO many times. It's frustrating when you feel like you're just helping your kids "catch up" with missing work or assignments. The good news though is that, as SLP's, we can be flexible. We can make it work!
Today, one of my students brought in a packet from History that he needed help with. Here is what it looked like:
Going through this packet, we were able to target:
- WH questions (What, why, how & where) - Inferencing ("What do you think he meant by....") - Writing (Sentence structure, adding in missing words, punctuation marks, etc...) - Listening Comprehension (I read the story aloud and asked him questions as we read) - Vocabulary (Discussed the meaning of words like "vile" and "morals")
Some strategies we were able to discuss and use:
- Annotating/underlining - Chunking
- Context Clues
- Turning questions into sentence starters
Believe it or not ALL of this was done in our 40 minute session (given that it was a short HW assignment). I felt pretty accomplished, and I think my student did too (or maybe he was just happy that he didn't have HW tonight, whatevs). You can do this with so many of the assignments your students have in their backback.
Here are some suggestions on incorporating classwork into your therapy sessions:
-Ask subject teachers what they're working on in class. Even if you can't get the actual assignment, at least you can work on skills that would be helpful
- Ask teachers to e-mail you readings or put it in your mailbox
- Stalk teachers if they don't e-mail you or put it in your mailbox (hey, we gotta do what we gotta do)
- Ask students to take out their HW folders for a particular subject and see what's going on.
Hopefully this can get you started! You'll be surprised how motivated some kids will be to do this. I plan on posting more about this topic at some point because it seems to be the nature of our job at this level.
How have you used classwork to target your students goals?