You Asked, I Answer {Survey Results}

Happy MONDAY! I am writing his from my new Mac and I am thrilled to say that I LOVE IT! It is so much faster (although it also has nothing on it right now, all my files are still trapped in the dead Dell). And oh my goodness I Love iPhoto. I also have Lightroom and Elements but iPhoto is just easy. I don’t know if you all know that I LOVE photography so this is just so darn exciting for me!

Anyway….

So last month almost 200 of you (thank you!) responded to my reader survey. I learned a lot about who my readers are and what you are all hoping to find here. MANY of you left me feedback and asked me questions that I am going to try to address here today, so here we go!

You Asked….

I asked you all what topics you would like me to cover in the future…here are some of your answers:

• Tips on teaching placement for specific sounds
• More info/career info for grad students
• Quick and easy therapy activities
• Using literature to target speech and language skills (i.e. wh questions)
• In classroom activities that may work for co-teaching
• Information on multi lingual/bilingual families
• Reinforcement for middle school
• When to dismiss (especially when a student has been in speech forever)
• More activities for children on the Autism Spectrum
• Therapy tips for Apraxia
• PECS
• Printable activities to go along with specific books
• Apps for therapy
• Behavior management tips, Working with children with behavioral problems
• Stuttering
• More ideas/activities for phonological processes
• Bring back Freebie Fridays
• Anything to do with Down Syndrome
• AAC
• Group speech time activities
• Videos of therapists working with children
• Planning lessons for large caseloads across grade levels
• Keeping Articulation Therapy Interesting
• Therapy and Crafts for older children, not just preschool and young children
• Pediatric dysphagia
• Tips on data collection in the birth to 5 population
• How to printout some of info to give to parents or colleagues
• Lateral lisp
• Frontal Lisp
• Cleft Palate

• How parents can help with articulation at home
• What parents can expect from speech therapy and their therapist
• What parents can ask from their SLP
• Working on listening skills at home
• How to help a late talker

I Answer….

You guys have some GREAT ideas for posts, and most of them I have had listed for a while! So I am really excited to bring you all some great new, and hopefully useful, information on many of the topics listed above.

But I’d love to comment on a few topics that have been requested.

Apps for Therapy: A few people asked if I could provide more on apps for therapy. So here is the thing. I don’t use my iPad in therapy. I know, shocking. Let me tell you why. First of all, my specialization is preschool (2-5) and I am planning on expanding that to birth to 5. I work with little guys who are still pretty motivated by play. I don’t want to bring an iPad into the picture unless I feel that the iPad could meet a goal faster and more efficiently that I can and so far that has not been the case. I very well will use it in the future but right now, I don’t. So it isn’t likely that I will be blogging too much about apps at least with my current job situation and caseload.

Activities for Middle Schoolers I get this request a lot. It is a very broad request 😉 I tend to blog more about what I am doing/thinking about right this moment which is why you haven’t seen a lot about middle school. I have worked in middle school and did so for a few years and I do have some recommendations right now:

• Get the GROW series of books. I Love them for middle school language.
• Visualizing and Verbalizing is a great program for this age as well.
• Teach the children strategies to use every day to help them learn.

If you have specific questions about middle school speech and language therapy, feel free to email me and I’ll see if it is something I can blog about. Generally speaking, at this exact moment I won’t be blogging a lot about this age group simply because I’m not working with that age group.

Group Therapy Ideas When I share therapy ideas, most (if not all) can be used for small groups. I have used simple crafts in small groups a TON in the past when I can. I even did the same crafts with my preschoolers as I did with my 4-5th graders! No joke. It’s all about the way you tailor that specific activity/craft to that age group. Off the top of my head though, my favorite group activities are bingo, barrier games, card games, story telling games. There are some crafts that when I share them, I did it with just one client (or my own kids) but most of the time they can be used with groups as well. I am going to write up a post this week or next specifically talking about how I ran and planned therapy when I was in the schools to give you all an idea on how I did this.

Cleft Palate and Pediatric Dysphagia These are topics that I simply do not have experience in, so you won’t see posts on these at least right now. If you are a reader who DOES have experience in these topics and would like to guest post shoot me an email! We’d LOVE to have you!

Autism Another one requested a lot and rightfully so. Children with Autism often make up a lot of our caseloads in the schools and early intervention. And I do have quite a bot of experience working with children on the spectrum and I will share some tips in the future. I will say that if you work with children on the spectrum (young) I highly recommend you read about verbal behavior and pivotal response. More later!

Info for Grad Students This is a wonderful request! However I am not sure exactly what you grad students would like to know. If you are a grad student and you want to know something, please send me an email or comment below and give me specific ideas of what you’d like to know. In the mean time, I’ll see what I can think up 😉

Freebie Fridays and Freebies in General Ahhhhhh yes. You’ve all noticed there haven’t been any freebies lately. I’m definitely sorry about that…I just haven’t had a lot of time lately. I will try to make some soon…most likely to go along with books!

Everything Else Most everything you all have asked for I will try to address. Please let me know, either in the comments or in am email, if there is anything else you’d like to see! I have lots planned for parents and will try to keep my posts evenly distributed (those for SLPs, Parents, and combo posts)

A Note on the Word “Activities”

OK bear with me here…for my fellow SLPs I see this a lot on message boards, Facebook groups and in emails to me. “Activities” for articulation, “activities” for phonology, “activities” for stuttering. I have to ask: What do you mean by activities? Here is why I ask. When I think of “activities” I am thinking of the activity I am doing with the kids, so reading a book and asking questions, playing bingo, playing a barrier game. So when I see “activities” for things like articulation, phonology and stuttering I get confused. Are you actually looking for intervention strategies and treatment methods? Because in my head, these are two very different things and the activity often is not nearly as important as the intervention strategy/treatment method for these areas.

For example, for phonology, my activity might be Bingo but my treatment method is Hodson’s Cycles approach.

However, when you ask for activities to target prepositions (and other language concepts)  that makes more sense to me. I would say barrier games, for example. I’ll go over how I tend to run my group sessions in a post this week or next.

Hope that makes sense! I just want to try to understand what it is people are looking for 🙂

OK off to be with my family. Hope you had a GREAT weekend!

Katie