Language and Literacy

Over the summer, I had the opportune pleasure of being placed at an intensive language and literacy camp for kinder and first graders in Vista, CA. Sixteen kids, eight student clinicians, two supervisors, and five short weeks to do it all. In dividing each week by thematic unit, we were able to tackle various behavioral, social, and language objectives while keeping it fun and engaging.

Here is a glimpse of what we did and what worked:

Week 1: Assessment 

The first week consisted of meeting the kids and conducting a speech and language screening. We informally screened speech and language ability by having the students do tasks involving word association, color naming, sentence repetition, sentence segmentation, articulation, naming categories, rhyming, story paraphrasing, expressive vocabulary, and analogies. For example, kids who gave functions of items rather than name the category the items belong in, demonstrated more rudimentary cognitive skills. Therefore, appropriate goals might focus on providing an item and having the kid name the category the item belongs in (e.g., a shark is an ocean animal, a grasshopper is an insect, milk is a beverage). 

However, the most telling baseline measures came from language sample analyses collected from story retell of wordless picture books. The wordless picture books we used included the frog book series by Mercer Mayer (in particular, we used Frog Goes to Dinner and Frog, Where Are You?). These books were excellent for baselining story sequencing, past tense -ed verbs, and irregular past tense verbs, especially since most of the kids were English language learners. The SALT Software proved to be a useful tool in comparing our language samples against norm-referenced peer samples reading the same frog book series.  

After working with the adult population for a year, there was quite a bit of mental shift that had to be done. But the most important lesson I learned is this: building rapport with the client, regardless of their age, is so important. The way I develop rapport with my clients is by reading their non-verbals, going with my intuition, and mirroring them naturally. Developing that relationship and trust really sets the tone for diagnostics and treatment. It's so important for clients to know that you genuinely care for them, want the best for them, and are working for and with them.

Week 2: Ocean Theme

My favorite book from our print awareness activity was the classic children's story, Rainbow Fish. It is such a simple book but with so much potential - social stories on sharing, past tense -ed, irregular past tense verbs - you name it! My favorite arts and crafts was a two-day activity, which consisted of comparing and contrasting Rainbow Fish before he shared his scales and after he shared his scales. The first day, the kids each decorated their own fish on paper plates with scales made out of colorful construction paper and shiny aluminum foil. Then, they described attributes of Rainbow Fish before he shared his scales (e.g., beautiful, sparkling/shimmering/shiny, proud, silent, lonely). The second day, the kids each decorated another fish on paper plates with scales made out of just colorful construction paper. Each kid was given only one scale made out of shiny aluminum foil. The kids then had to share their shiny scale with another kid to carry out the moral of the story. Finally, they described attributes of Rainbow Fish after he shared his scales (e.g., sharing, happy, friendly, playful, one shiny scale).

An awesome experiential learning activity that worked really well was going on a "field trip" to the beach. We set up a blue tarp in the middle of the classroom, with toy ocean animals of various sizes and species. Around the tarp, we set up beach chairs, beach towels, beach bags, floppy hats, buckets and shovels, and the like. First, we asked whether any of the students had gone on a field trip, and what is needed before going on a field trip (e.g., parent permission slip). Next, we talked about cautionary signs one might see around the beach (e.g., high tide, sharks, strong current, tsunami). Then, the kids were able to explore the makeshift beach and talk about what they found, which worked on irregular past tense verbs. Finally, one of the student clinicians pretended to be the mailman and mailed a post card for each student (This was tied to a small-group activity during the week, in which each student randomly chose another student's name out of bowl. The students learned about the components of a postcard, wrote a postcard greeting, and decorated a destination postcard). This incredibly meta activity was actually a hit, and it reinforced several objectives, including learning each others' names, sharing with peers, and snail mailing a letter.