If you have spent time in a school placement with a large caseload while obtaining your clinical clock hours, you know that in addition to having a great case management system to help you stay on top of your deadlines and student minutes/services, it is important to also have a workable schedule. As you start your CF experience, you will be factoring in teacher schedules, student availability and your own demands such as case conferences and evaluations. It will take some time and several adjustments to your therapy schedule in the first few weeks to get a final product that you feel you can work with. You may even tweak it throughout the year.
Inevitably, you will be faced with having to group students who are not working on the same goals and this will be awkward initially, particularly if you don’t have a lot of experience combining articulation and language therapy ideas. There’s some good news though - You do not have to recreate the wheel! WHEW! Over the next several months, start to gather and review resources that address mixed therapy groups.
There are a few things to keep in mind:
If you are just in the teaching phase of correct production for an articulatory error, you might want to see this student for 5 minutes independent of the group. This will give you time to teach and practice prior to drilling with the other students of a mixed therapy group. This will help you maximize your time in the group and keep the turns flowing without long pauses.
Remember that your articulation students need lots of drills/practice – if they are only saying one word during their ‘turn’, this is not enough. Consider having them say the target word 5 times during their turn. Maximize your productions!! I cannot say this enough.
Try to keep all students engaged while they each take a turn. Consider behavior incentives for fidgety students.
While I do not have any specific ‘go-to’ items, I would suggest looking on Teachers Pay Teachers and checking out some of the materials in a “speech and language companion” search. You will get lots of options with detailed information about what skills are targeted and what grade levels you are targeting.
The Stepping Stones Group also has a couple of great resource boards on our Pinterest page. We have developed and actively maintained our Pinterest page as a way to give back to the therapy community. We have over 1.5 million monthly viewers! Take some time to review 2 specific boards – 1) Students SLPs CFs Auds and 2) Both Speech & Lang.
https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Browse/Search:speech%20and%20language%20companion
https://www.pinterest.com/ssg_therapy/students-slps-cfs-auds/
https://www.pinterest.com/ssg_therapy/both-speech-lang/?autologin=true
