Disco Chickens and Social Thinking…

I recently started a new school job as a SLP (speech language pathologist).  I moved to a new county after fifteen years in my  former school, and hoped for the best.  While no job is perfect, this one is pretty promising!  There are five (yes, five full time) SLPs, supporting a large school with multiple special needs and self-contained classes at the elementary level. It is a quick commute to my school from my new home (lots of changes this year!), but one day last week, I got stuck behind a tractor, making my drive time a whopping fifteen minutes.  The road by my house was shut down this week for a bit, due to a wandering cow.  I’m not in Kansas Atlanta anymore, am I?!

** see postscript at the bottom of this post!!

The week continued with a school tour, and lo and behold, we have a huge garden near the playground (there are often yummy tomatoes in the workroom for anyone who wants to take them home).  Right next to the garden are two goats, a duck pool and a chicken house with a disco ball (see the picture above), totally unexpected, but in a good way!! My speech peeps and I started thinking about how we could do thematic therapy out here:  farmticulation,  chicken chat conversation skills, billy goat grammar….We could do this all.day.long.  Word play is our forte (I think I need to put that on a T-shirt)!

All this change and possibility got me thinking about the social language concepts that I teach my students each year: flexible thinking, emotional regulation, sharing space effectively with others, thinking about other people, using a social filter, etc…  I am using ALL of these and more as I adjust to my new school and the huge learning curve of changing to a new system, kids, co-workers, building, etc. !!  Add to this that four of the five of us are new to the county, so we all have to be social thinkers to work together successfully.  Our profession is often associated with SLPs being the tiniest bit of type A personalities, but thankfully, my fellow SLPs are smart, funny and flexible thinkers.  It was a good reminder to me that the Social Thinking® lessons that I teach my students are skills that we will use across our lifespan, not just in school, and how powerful and valuable they truly are!!

I am so excited to start my new adventures and I hope that those of you starting school soon are excited too!  Here’s to a great year, and if you stop by to visit my school, you can probably find me hanging out with the disco chickens by the playground….

Post script:  A cow wandered in front of my school yesterday! I think he wants to join in all the barnyard fun with us!

 

 

 

 

 

Trust is a two way street.

This past school year brought an unusually large amount of contentious speech meetings my way, involving attorneys and advocates.  I traveled our large county to support my fellow SLPs in these long, stressful meetings.   It began to feel like these meetings were becoming the norm, at least in my former school system, without the parents first communicating their concerns directly to the SLP and/or teachers.  To be fair, I have worked with some fabulous advocates who really had what was best for the student at the heart of their agendas, and I was always happy to be part of those meetings!   The bottom line is that this is what all of us should be aiming for, right?  I have also been the mom of a child with an IEP, so I have been on both sides of this table.

What is alarming to me is the tendency to jump over the social protocol of talking to someone they have a concern with directly.  Instead, they immediately call a meeting, armed with legal representation.  This leads to a lot of miscommunication, frustration and anxiety between the team members and the family.  Trust is a two way street.  I watched families demand the school pay for summer services, private tutors and camps for their children, even when the student had made steady progress all year.  As a parent, I knew it was equally my responsibility to provide support at home for my child, so I hired a tutor, spent extra time working on what my son’s teachers sent home and attended conferences with them to better understand his strengths and weaknesses.  Yes, it was expensive and time-consuming, but it was what I felt I needed to do to help him succeed.  It cannot all fall on the school, it has to be a shared responsibility with the family.

Unfortunately, it is rare that anyone speaks up in these meetings with advocates and attorneys to ask what the parent is doing to support these skills too. I have seen parents and attorneys berate SLPs and teachers at these meetings in a manner that they would never tolerate being spoken to, and barely anyone bats an eye. Why? Fear keeps us quiet, no one wants to be a target in these meetings.  I wish I had been braver to speak up more often in these meetings.  It is a slippery slope to try to get the family on board with working together, when all they hear is “no” and their legal support labels us as bad teachers and SLPs, since we clearly do not want to help the child.   This is typically the point the meeting is at a standstill and everyone is feeling crummy.

My former boss has an amazing way of staying calm and refocusing the team on finding solutions to problems in these difficult meetings. Sometimes this resolved the issues quickly, sometimes not, but we always knew she had our back.  She took a lot of verbal abuse on our behalf with extraordinary grace in these meetings, and not once did I see her react or retaliate.  Attacking and disrespecting the people working with your child is not okay. Talk to us and help us understand your concerns and answer your questions, we really are on the same team and want your child to succeed!  I think it goes back to the basic social premise of thinking about how our words and actions make other people feel and should be the golden rule in meetings. Treat others the way you would want to be treated.

How do you handle difficult meetings?  How do involve your families in carryover and support? Share here!

What’s a Popplet?

It sounds like a cute Saturday morning cartoon character or a yummy pastry, but Popplet is actually an interactive graphic organizer app! It’s available on itunes but I am lucky enough to have it as part of my Office 365 suite on my school computer!  This app is described on their  website : “In the classroom and at home, students use Popplet for learning. Used as a mind-map, Popplet helps students think and learn visually. Students can capture facts, thoughts, and images and learn to create relationships between them.”  My students, especially my students with social language impairments, ADD and/or executive function impairments, are definitely visual learners! I am too, so here is a link to a youtube video that shows how to build a Popplet organizer.  Here is a link to a fabulous education blog that outlines multiple uses for Popplet in school with a great step by step tutorial.   One of my SLPeeps (thanks Joy!) introduced me to this in a presentation recently and my mind jumped right to social language concepts (I know, it’s an obsession)!

How cool would this be to use for social mapping?  You could add a picture of the problem scenario in the middle (or even have the students role play problems and take actual pictures of them to use with the app).  Then, use the organizer to build out expected/unexpected pathways (you can color code them too) and tease out how their choices impact how others think and feel.  If your students have tablets in your school system as ours do, you can push out the Popplet to them individually and they have an immediate visual social map to refer to.

What about our friends who have difficulty with group work?  Building a Popplet together might be more enticing to my students who love technology and sneak in some collaborative learning skills at the same time in the therapy setting or in the classroom!  I can see this being used to work on expanding social language concepts such as perspective taking using a graphic organizer, connecting the concepts of think/say/feel and even linking shades of emotions using Popplet.  I want to try it out and have my kids look at a picture in the middle, then identify and connect the clues they see in order to make a smart guess!   It would be fantastic to be able to print a screenshot and blow it up to poster size to refer to in your therapy room or classroom too.

I am excited to try out this new therapy tool and see how it goes.  Have you used Popplet? Please share your thoughts here.  If not, how would you use it for social language therapy?

Better late than never.

I had the opportunity to work with a young adult who was recently diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum.  Evaluation at this age is tricky, as some of the standardized tests that we use in the schools age out at 17-11.  It is not uncommon for my students who are on the autism spectrum to come to their diagnosis rather late, especially if they are higher functioning and doing well academically.  They are often diagnosed as having ADHD, sensory integration disorder, mood disorders, sleep disorders and/or learning disabilities first.  These can exist co-morbidly in some people with ASD and it is difficult to tease apart one from the other.  I ran across this great blog written by a woman diagnosed with ASD at age 36, that really spoke to me regarding the topic of later diagnosis.

After testing my student with a few standardized measures, the meat of the evaluation was done using a variety of non-standardized tools such as the Double Interview from Social Thinking ®,  direct observation, conversation with the parents, gaining feedback from the teachers, giving parts of the Informal Social Assessment from Super Power Speech and utilizing the Social Language Development Test-Adolescent for information only (as the student was older than 18 and norms end at 17-11).  A standardized test score from the supra-linguistic portion of the CASL or the social checklist and activities on the CELF 5 will yield some good information, however my higher functioning students can do these highly structured tasks well but still struggle socially in the fast, ever changing day to day applications.   I find that the non-standardized pieces truly give you a better picture of the person’s social skills and social competency, and the resulting narrative is much more descriptive than a standard score.

I came across a treasure trove of articles on the Social Thinking® website, including a three part series on transitioning into adulthood for people on the spectrum and another about including the young adult as part of their planning team when working on social language competencies.  Explaining what social language is and how having ASD impacts our social relationships with others is so important for the family as well as the person with ASD, especially when a diagnosis has come later in life after many challenges.  I also really like the website Wrong Planet , as it is created and hosted by 3 young adults on the spectrum.  It has great content that connects with many young adults, such as finding and keeping a job, dating, and post-secondary education options.  I also love the blog series by Autism Classroom News on teaching the Hidden Rules curriculum and how understanding these rules are crucial to keeping our students and young adults with ASD employed and even out of legal trouble.

We need to consider how to support our students exiting public school with later diagnosis of ASD and help them transition successfully into early adulthood.  What resources have you found to help with this transition?  Share here!

 

 

Puzzle it out.

This time of year is the perfect storm.  IEP season is in full swing, Spring break is just around the corner (woohoo) and everyone is feeling a bit squirmy and squirrelly (including the SLP).  I like to have a variety of therapy options to keep my kids engaged, but my budget is tight right now.  I looked in my magic cabinet of therapy materials to see what I could add to my bag of tricks that wouldn’t elicit groans of “no, not that.”   I spotted a shiny metal box that contained a 30 piece Star Wars themed puzzle and knew I hit the jackpot!

Really, a puzzle?  You put it together and it’s done, boring.  Well, yes, it can be if you use it exactly like that.  How about using the puzzle pieces as a therapy activity to work on gestalt thinking with your social learners?   Show a piece at a time (without showing a picture of the final product) and have them make smart guesses as to what the puzzle might be. Have any friends that focus on the unimportant details and miss the big picture?  Me too, and this is harder for them than you would think!  Add in a little group work razzle dazzle and your students will be working together to problem solve putting the picture together (without a model).  You are embedding the Social Thinking® concepts of turn taking, sharing personal space, regulating emotions (when the pieces don’t fit quite right), thinking with your eyes and sticking with a group plan!

Working on non-verbal skills? Have your students put the puzzle together without talking. They have to watch each other, use gestures and pay attention to cues that it’s their turn to put their puzzle piece in.  For our students with impulsivity or difficulty with emotional regulation, this might be challenging!  Start with short, easy puzzles to help them feel successful and build resilience in these skills.

With younger students or students working at an early social cognitive level,  you can use wooden puzzles with several pieces.  I use the puzzle pieces as a template to cut out pictures from magazines or google images that fit a theme. For example, I might cut out pictures of candy, pumpkins, costumes, October on a calendar and a bat.  Then I ask the students to take turns removing the puzzle pieces to reveal the clues and  make a guess as to what all these pictures are talking about (Halloween).  You can scaffold the picture clues from easy to more difficult as they develop this skill.

Reinforce conversational turn taking by giving each student a few puzzle pieces, with you providing a topic of discussion.  As each student adds a comment or connected question to the conversation, they get to add a piece of the puzzle.  Start with large piece puzzles at first (8-10 pieces) and as your students get the hang of this, add more pieces and change topics within the conversation. You could also choose puzzles that are areas of high interest for your students (Star Wars, Super Mario Brothers, Legos, Dinosaurs) and use the puzzle pieces as reinforcers for maintaining topic during therapy. They earn a piece of the puzzle each time you catch them keeping their brain in the group (or whatever social concept you are working on that day).  If you can’t find a puzzle that matches an area of interest (guinea pigs, for example) just find a google image of said interest, print, laminate and cut into puzzle pieces, voila’!  Make sure you leave a few minutes at the end of the session for the student to put the puzzle together.

Do you use puzzles in social language therapy?  Share your ideas here!

 

 

 

Will You Be My Social Valentine?

Valentine’s Day is upon us, and I am reminded again that it is a holiday that can be quite tricky for my students with social language impairments!  There is a whole lot of indirect language, hidden rules and emotional regulation in this holiday.  I found this adorable “monster crush” mailbox at my local dollar store (score!) and started thinking of all the ways I can use it this holiday, in my social therapy.  Here are few that you might want to try too!

ESL websites are a great resource of figurative language activities that also benefit my kids with social language impairments!  Here is one from EverythingESL on idioms related to the heart.  You can write the idioms on a paper heart and the students have to take them out of the mailbox and explain what the idiom literally means.  You can extend the activity by having them draw or write the meaning on the hearts and make a fun bulletin board from them.

For my upper grade students, I have this Cupid Quandary freebie in my TPT store.

 It has sixteen sticky social situations for your kids to talk through (you can use the mailbox with this as well for turn taking).  It includes some blank template cards to add your own scenarios too.

I use the Superflex® curriculum from Michelle Garcia Winner, and she has created a group of characters called Unthinkables.  These characters personify some of the challenges my students may have, such as not being a flexible thinker (Rock Brain) or poor emotional regulation (Glassman).  I have seen a few other SLPs (like Speech Room News ) create Unthinkable Valentines from these characters and have the students guess who they belong to.  You could also give the student the Unthinkable and ask them to write a card from the Unthinkable’s point of view (much harder)!  Extend the activity by talking about how the person receiving that Valentine might think or feel.

You could even get a little crazy and buy 2 mailboxes to sort valentine’s cards or hearts based on things you would say vs.things you should think or expected vs.unexpected comments related to Valentine’s Day. These are also social language concepts from Social Thinking®, so check it out if you haven’t already!

Want some more budget friendly Valentine’s Day ideas?  Visit my Instagram page @SmartmouthSLP each day this week for dollar store ideas to target social language concepts!

It’s not a box of chocolates, but I hope these ideas make your Valentine’s day social language therapy a little sweeter!

Ugly Sweaters and Inferences.

Earlier this year, I posted about using T-shirt slogans for inferences.  Tis the season for ugly sweater parties, so why not extend this concept to the holidays too? I found this great freebie on TPT from LittleRed when you follow her store (you will get a pass code to download the clipart) with a variety of clip art holiday sweaters like the one in the picture above!. You can make your own slogan/picture activities for your late elementary through high school students to figure out the meaning  or guess who might wear these holiday sweaters.  If you don’t want to make your own, the internet is FULL of great examples. Preview first my friends, preview first, I saw a LOT of inappropriate sweaters (don’t use them, but they are sure to give you a laugh). On a related note, I also found a cool website, Stereotype Design, that gives a few sentences on a T shirt and you have to guess the movie ( well, hello figuring out the big picture from details!).

You can create a whole Pinterest board of ugly holiday sweaters/t-shirts to work on these skills as well (or just click for my board here; it’s a growing work in progress, just like me).  Walk them through a few examples to practice together, then see how they do!

The questions you can pose with the ugly sweaters could include:

What do you think the message or picture means (intent)?  

Is this literal or sarcastic?   If it’s humorous, what makes it funny?

Who might wear this?  Who would NEVER wear this?

What do you think other people might think or feel when they see this sweater?  

Where would it be okay to wear this sweater?  Where would it NOT be okay to wear this sweater? 

What first impression do you have of someone wearing this sweater?  

What background knowledge might you need to understand the slogan or picture?

Would you wear this sweater?  Why or why not?

If you disagree or are upset with a sweater picture or slogan, should you say something?  Why or why not?

*Ask your students to take pictures of any other interesting holiday sweaters that they see to extend this activity.  You can call it “operation sweater sleuth”! I would clearly state the rule that the slogan/pictures can’t have any profanity or inappropriate content, especially with your middle schoolers on up.

Any good, kid friendly holiday sweater slogans or pictures that you have seen recently?  Share here!