I know finding speech therapy materials for high school students can be difficult. I also know that some students still benefit from having skills broken down into specific learning modules. They get lost when presented passages containing complex sentences and unknown vocabulary. Teachers Pay Teachers is having their annual Cyber Sale so I thought I would take advantage by showcasing two of my products that work with the High School crowd.
Recently, I have been a substitute Speech Language Pathologist (SLP) at a high school location. I found at the high school level it is often more relevant for students to bring their class work for speech therapy. However, the students being served often forget and come empty handed. I try to have activities on hand to make the time productive. I thought I would showcase 2 activities that have worked well with encompassing what they are working on. They are Word Association Cards for vocabulary development and Sentence Sequence Task Cards for complex sentence comprehension and development. There are free samples in the Vocabulary section of this blog for the Association cards and in the Expressive section for the Sentence Sequence Task Cards. If you haven’t tried them yet you should. If you want to get the full sets at my TPT store, they happen to be part of the Cyber Sale which makes them a real bargain. Click on the covers for a direct link to TPT
Our speech students are often behind with developing vocabulary. This affects them throughout all their classes. One way to boost vocabulary is to develop word association skills. They need to be able to compare and contrast new words to integrate them into the vocabulary they already have. I often tell them this analogy: Your brain is a closet with different shelves and drawers holding different words. You try to place things together that are similar such as your socks in a sock drawer. If you just try to memorize words without making connections with other words you know, it is like throwing everything in one big pile on the floor and trying to find a brown sock to match another brown sock. You won’t be able to find or remember what you have when you need it. It seems many of them can relate to this. Therefore categorizing and making associations is an important skill to learn for their academic career. This is a skill that gets better with practice.
High School students are often required to take notes on subjects that use a lot of complex sentence forms. They they need to be able to consolidate information and retain the meaning in their notes. Sequencing events using complex sentence forms is a natural way to get students to produce complex sentences and practice this. These cards present two different activities to address production and comprehension and promote better note taking.
In Activity 1, the students are instructed to use the main details of the three given sentences to form one complex sentence using connecting words such as; and, so, but, because, before, after, when, while, that, and then. In sentence production, students replace parts of the sentence with pronouns to prevent redundancy. They need to consider which information is most important, hold information into memory, think about time sequence, and then manipulate the ideas into one sentence. These skills are used in note taking as well as comprehending complex sentences in reading passages.
In Activity 2 the student is presented sentence examples. The students may have developed some of these while completing the first activity. One of the sentences does not have the same meaning as the other two or is an incorrect use of the conjunction. The students are instructed to find the incorrect sentence. The answer is provided in a QR code in the lower right corner of the card or by using the answer sheet. Students can correct the error sentence for additional practice. Student are often motivated by using technology and appreciate the QR code. It means the cards can also be used for independent practice.
I hope you find these products useful and they free up your time from lesson planning. Happy Holidays.
Readers Notice: This blog has been updated to let readers know the products now have the TPT interactive layer added and are appropriate for distance learning. This allows students to circle or underline the answers or hide the answers if you wish.