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This week on the podcast, we’re trucking along with part two of our three-part series targeting grammar!

Last week we covered the fundamentals, and this week we’re going to build on that foundation with therapy plans and targets for early grammar goals…in the context of literacy-based therapy. 💪

You’ll learn the five steps of a literacy-based therapy unit, evidence-based strategies that can be used to target students’ individualized grammar goals, and a few practical therapy activities that can be used when targeting grammar goals!

So grab your beverage of choice (I’ll have a chai latte!), put your feet up, and listen in.

Key Takeaways + Topics Covered

– Evidence-based strategies to target students’ grammar goals
– Practical therapy activities that can be used when targeting grammar goals

Links Mentioned in the Podcast

Dr. Ukrainetz: Contextualized Language Intervention (affiliate link)
SLP Now (Materials for easy therapy)
The Avery Easy Index (affiliate link)
GetEpic.com
Connell 1982 article
The Toca Boca apps

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Thanks so much!

Transcript

Hey there, it's Marisha and today we are diving into part two of the grammar series that we have going on this January. And today we are going to be focusing on strategies that we can use when using picture books in particular for early grammar goals. And then we'll talk about some of the different types of pieces that go with that. And I find, so we're going to be applying what we learned last week about how to structure grammar intervention and how to map that onto a literacy-based therapy unit, because we could definitely follow just that grammar intervention. But oftentimes our students are working on multiple goals, and we also often have other students in the group as well. So there's that's going on there.

So just a quick recap of how I structure my literacy-based therapy sessions. This is based on several research articles, but Dr. Ukrainetz lays it out very nicely in her book titled Contextualized Language Intervention. And you can purchase it on Amazon or through some other sellers, but that has been very helpful for me. And so she outlines a five step framework. The first step is pre-story knowledge activation. The second step is reading the story. The third step is comprehension activities. The fourth step is, discreet skill practice. And the fifth one is a parallel story. So I'll just quickly give a quick overview of what those include, and then we'll go into a little bit more detail as we walk through how we would target grammar goals in each of those stages.

So first step is pre-story knowledge activation. This is where when we ask specific or ask questions or have some discussions or do some learning based on the topic that we're talking about. And this is just to help build the student build some schema, and just start increasing an understanding of what that concept is that we're looking at. So I'll give a much more specific example once we actually dive into the unit. Then the second step is where we read the book. And this is typically, I try and pick something that can be read in about five to 10 minutes. And when we do the read through, we're still embedding some different strategies, we're doing some recasting, but I personally don't ask a ton of questions during this stage because we're definitely going to be diving into all of that later. I just want the students to really focus on the story, and any strategies that I do use are, like I said, just to emphasize some concepts, or to make sure that I maintain the student's attention because it won't be helpful if they're daydreaming while I read the story.

Then the fourth step is that discrete skill instruction really targeted practice for those skills. And we'll dive into all of the grammar examples when we get there. And then the parallel story, it's my favorite way to put every combine all of the skills that we've been working on throughout the unit. And the student has the opportunity to create their own story that's related to what we read. So the process that I typically use is I have a story grammar graphic organizer that I will use when we're doing the comprehension activities, and the structured skill practice for the story that we read. We'll fill in that organizer with the elements of the story, and then we'll take a new graphic organizer and look back at the one that we filled in, and come up with a story that makes sense. So I'll give some different examples when we get to that step, but hopefully that gives you just a broad overview of what we'll be looking at.

And last week when we talked about grammar, we also had some different steps, like a five step framework that we talked about there. And so the first step just to recap, that was assessment. So ideally that's something that we do before we get started so we can identify the targets. But students are constantly changing and growing and learning new things and maybe forgetting some things, losing some skills. So when it comes to structuring my sessions, I like to check in on the goals periodically. So at the beginning of every session I do just a quick probe, and I usually write my goals without support, unless I'm using a rubric, and then I'll do that. And the rubric typically does include support. But that just helps me collect really clean data and makes it really easy to see where the student is, whether I'm taking the data or a colleague, or if the student moves somewhere, then we can have consistent data.

And I just take, I run through typically just one quick probe for each student. So we'll just hop around the group, collect that data and then within a couple of minutes we're ready to jump into the activity. So that's where that assessment component comes in throughout the treatment progression. And because I always get questions about this, but I keep the assessments in a binder. And I have the... it's called the Avery Easy Index, and I bought the one that has 31 tabs, and I just use that to organize all the different probes. And whenever I write an IEP for a student, I make sure that I put the probe in that binder. And whenever it's just like a process in my therapy, whenever we update goals, the student creates goal cards because they should be involved in the process. They should know what their goals are and why they are working on them.

And so we'll put that together. The student will write his or her goal in his or her own words, and then we will write a number on that student's goal cards, or each goal card will have a number. And that number will correspond to the tab in my data binder that includes their probes. So it's really easy. I just have each student ends up with a little deck of cards. I shuffle through those cards. So whichever goal is on the top is the one that will typically be probed, and we can switch it up if we need to. But yeah, we just paper clip those things together, shuffle through one every session. And that's generally how I do things. It's definitely not like exactly that every single time. Sometimes I decide we don't, aren't going to do that or sometimes we need to collect data on more goals. It just varies, and I use my clinical judgment there, but I think that process as a whole works really well for me.

So that was step one. The framework that we talked about for grammar is that assessment. Then step two is teaching, three is focused emulation, four is structured practice, and five is embedded practice. So steps two through four typically happen in the fourth step of the literacy-based therapy framework where we're doing that focus skill practice. But as we go through the unit, I will tell you where else they might pop up, and where else we might start add those in because we're definitely doing more work on grammar than just in that one section of therapy plan. And then step five is that embedded practice. So this is specially comes in when we're doing the parallel story, but it really comes in throughout the entire unit as well.

So hopefully that was a good refresher. And I just wanted to recap something that I thought was really helpful, and because I put the steps in this order because from the research that I found, students should not imitate sentences until they've heard several examples of the grammar target. So this is going to come up when I talk about the plan. So just to repeat it because it's important, students should not imitate sentences until they've heard several examples of the grammar target. And then research also recommends doing quick drill practice before jumping into embedded practice. So those are important to keep in mind. So we want to definitely give lots and lots of exposure to a grammar target before the student imitates it. And we also, it's helpful to do a quick drill to like prime that concept even more before we're asking them to use it in a more embedded context.

Okay. So let us jump in to the actual plan. So we'll start the unit that I'm going through today because it's winter time when we're recording this, and I think this is a story that can go through. We could use it in January and February, even March in some places would be appropriate, as well as like December. But we're going to be using The Mitten. It's a book by Jan Brett, and it is about a young boy who asks for white mittens from his grandmother, and she makes them for him, but she definitely doubts the decision because she's worried that he'll lose the white mittens in the snow. And then he goes out and plays. He of course, loses his mitten, a bunch of animals crawl into the mitten. And then at the end of the story, there's... and you'll have to read the book to find out why because it's super, super suspenseful. But The Mitten ends up not exploding, but the animals take up too much space, the mitten starts flying, and the boy finds the mitten again. And then he goes home and doesn't get in trouble.

So nice find storyline, easy to follow for our students. And there's some nice repetition in there. So there's a couple of things that we might talk about during the pre-story knowledge activation steps. So we're just going to jump into those plants now. So one strategy that I like to use across books, and it might be interesting to do this first to see what your students know about the topic, and then you can fill in from there or you can do it right before you get ready to read whatever works. Use your clinical judgment here. But I like to do a book walk. We'll look, and this is good for just general literacy awareness if our students aren't quite readers yet, we can just talk about the book, like the front cover and the pages and all of those different elements. But then we'll look at the cover, and we'll talk about, what do you think gets about? And then we'll start going through the pages. We'll point out things that we notice. And that's a good way to see what the student knows, and what they're queuing into and all of that.

And then I do really like asking questions about, like what do you think will happen? And all of that. And so that's one really helpful strategy. And so we can, again, just to recap, we can look at the title of the book. We can just say, "Oh, we're going to read blah, blah, blah. What do you think it'll be about?" And then you can pull out the book and be like, "Oh, here's the cover. Was that a good guest? Blah blah blah." And then we can start looking at some of the pictures just grabbing what's happening there, and making some guesses. And then if the students, like I'm an Arizona, and a lot of my students have never been in the snow. So I might ask them if they've ever been in this snow because that'll be important to understanding the story, like why does the boy need mittens? Why are the animals crawling into the mitten? And all of those different components.

So that's something that we might talk about and dive into. We might talk about the forest, and what kinds of animals live in the forest. We might talk about different seasons and like why is there snow in the winter and things like that. And then there's countless, countless things that we could dive into. We get to use our clinical judgment and dive into the elements that are we think are most crucial to the comprehension of the story for the student. And also we can dive into whatever they're focusing on in the classroom too and making it relevant there. So I usually like to pick stories based on what's happening in the classroom. And so seasonal themes make that very easy because they're often discussing those types of things, but we can also cue into specific units, like if they're doing a huge weather unit, then I will definitely cue in to the snow component and dive into that.

And some fun ways to switch that up, I love doing virtual field trips. YouTube has tons and tons and tons of options available to us. And so you can find like a field trip of "a snowy forest." And maybe there's a video of animals that live, like snowy animals that live in the forest, and it happens to be in the winter time. And there's lots of different options there. And then, Oh, also note, if you don't have access to a physical book, there's tons and tons of options of, like getting it from the library or garage sale or use books online or Goodwill or there's Vooks which is free for teachers for a year where you can find animated books for a lot of animated books are available.

There's also getepic.com. They have free access for educators and those are just eBooks. But a super easy way to find books is through YouTube. And so The Mitten is available on YouTube. It can be fun and engaging for students to kind of they really tuning to watching that video and they just have like grandmas and teachers. Then all sorts of people reading, recording themselves, reading stories online. So it's kind of interesting. But that's a good hack if you're like, "I would love to implement this, but I don't have a budget for books." Well, now you do because there's tons of options. Even if you don't have a computer or a tablet, you can pull this up on your phone. Hopefully you have a computer because you're doing documentation and everything. But yeah there's always a way to... where there's a will, there's a way. So we can make this happen.

So that wraps up some of the activity ideas. And you might be thinking, "Okay. So what does this have to do with grammar?" Great question. So one strategy that there's a lot of evidence for is recasting. So if a student says, "He goed outside," like say, "He went outside." And we can recast that, give them the structure or him went outside, then we could say, "He went outside" whatever the target is, like they're going to be misusing the target form in conversation. Otherwise, maybe it's not the best target in the world, but like pronouns, verbs, irregular plural nouns, all of that stuff, that'll come up in the discussion. So I am recasting that. And then if I'm doing more talking than I am emphasizing the target that I want the student to really hone in on. So just to make it not super overwhelming, I'll use you to try to pick, like there's typically one target that several students in the group are working on. So that's an easy one to focus on, or oh, we haven't done this in a while.

This would be really good. Just like I use my clinical judgment to decide which one I want to focus on during different sections of the unit. But that helps it set us up for that later practice because we need the students to have exposures to those targets before we expect them to imitate them. So that is, I'm just really priming the pump there and helping set them up for success with the comprehension of the unit, the language components, but at the same time we're working on those grammar goals. So then for step two we talked about this, we're reading the story. The same thing applies. I might emphasize, if we're really working on like plural nouns, I will emphasize those a little more, or if there's pronouns I might replace, as it makes sense, I might replace the name of the character with a pronoun, or I might switch out verbs a little bit as I'm reading just to include the target forms. And it's totally doable if you just pick the focus that you want to have, and then you just do that as you're reading.

So that's one easy way to make that happen. And then, for step three, we've got comprehension. And for this it depends on where the students are. So if we're doing comprehension activities, like almost always there's at least one student who has some goals related to comprehension. So I like to do just basic comprehension, and we can switch it up. It can be literal, inferential, wherever they're at, that's the level of questions that I will ask. And it also depends on how much support they need. Some students, I can just ask the question, and they'll be able to answer. Some students, I can ask the question with the page of the book open, and they'll be able to answer. Some students need a lot more scaffolded support. So I've made a ton of question cards for the specific books that have three visual answer choices. So I might just pull out those cards and do those activities. If three choices is too much, I'll give them two, and we can make it even more learning if we just give them one, and we just practice answering.

So there's lots of different ways to make that happen. And so as we're doing that, because they are producing sentences as they answer these questions. So again, this is an opportunity to model and recast their productions as well. And if I asked the student, "What did the boy want." And he says, "A mitten." And then I can say, "He wanted a mitten. The boy wanted a mitten." Whatever the target is. If we're working on the verb or the pronouns, you get the idea. So that's how I do that, if we're doing just basic comprehension questions. I also, because I know that we're going to be working on story grammar narratives later in the unit. Even if we don't have a story, retell goal per se, I think it's still an incredibly helpful way to embed that grammar practice because that's step five, kind of embedding that concept. And then it's also a great way to work on just regular other vocabulary and language goals. And there's so much amazing research on narratives. Like it's so cool. Such good stuff. But yeah, so that's what we're doing.

And then if the same thing applies because story grammar includes questions, like who was this story about? When did the story happen? Where did the story happen? So I use those same strategies as we're going through the questions. And for story grammar, I made different interactive activities. So I have the organizer that includes the seven elements of the story. Then I look for, and then it has different pictures with text underneath that represent the different elements of the story. And so I can give them no visual options by just asking the question. I can give them the field of seven, field of two, whatever that might look like. And then again, I'm recasting those targets, or modeling and or recasting what I see, or what I hear from the students, and whatever the target goal is. So that is step three.

So we've talked about the pre-story knowledge activation, how we're working on those. We've talked about reading, how we're targeting grammar during that activity, and we talked about the comprehension activities, and how retargeting grammar goals during that. So now we're into the targeted skill practice. And this is where it gets super juicy. And this is where we get into all of the ideas that we talked about last week. So if we recap the framework, we've done our assessment at the beginning of this session. The second step is to teach the concept. So I obviously do this a little bit up front when we're just going through their goals. I want to talk about, why we are even working on grammar goals, why they matter. Definitely head back to last week's episode if you want to felt remind yourself of what we talked about there. But then when we get to this activity, I created different visuals for the different grammar goals that I work on.

So I think thing that explains the pronouns, and the irregular past tense verbs and the regular plural nouns. And just to set up the discussion, and giving them something to look at that explains the concept is really helpful. Another way that I like to teach is, we're teaching when we're highlighting those forms. And when we're a notice, and if we notice the student using it, we can highlight that, and just modeling it all throughout is a form of teaching. And then I also really like to help my students just like it's learning by doing. So I made this sentence pack that includes icons for all of the different parts of speech, even determiners and all of that good stuff. So it makes it really easy to put together sentence strips. And so we'll go through the pages of the book. And so we might first put, "The boy is walking." And if we're working on pronouns, we'll work on replacing the boy with the pronoun he. And so we create sentences, so that they understand what the sentence means and then work on replacing it.

And I think that's a really helpful way. Sometimes that's not the best strategy for a student. We play it by ear. And sometimes we just have to ask, "Is this a boy or a girl?" And then they'll say, whenever that is, and then we'll pick the appropriate pronoun, and go from there. And then yeah, so that's how we set that up. And I think having the visuals is incredibly helpful. So the same thing goes for regular plural nouns, regular past tense verbs. We have the morphine that we can add on and we'll practice using that. And so it just getting them familiar with the concept. And we've given them a ton of exposure. So we're ready to start jumping into more of that structured practice. But like what I said before, it's just the teaching component is going through the visual and maybe showing a little bit of it in action. And then we have been providing that focus stimulation like the models and recasts throughout the entire unit.

So I think at that point we've given them enough exposure to jump into more of that structured practice. And this is where the good stuff comes in. So at this point, we can model a structure, and then have the student produce it. The student has had enough exposure to start imitating. Typically, if this is a big struggle, then maybe it is. We need to give the student more exposure before we expect them to produce it. But I find that over time students just naturally start imitating it. So even before we get to this step, if I keep recasting like, "Her running." And then if I say, "She is running." The student will automatically start to say, "She is running." And this doesn't always happen, but it's helpful when it does because that's a really good indicator that we're ready to move on to the next step.

So then the next piece is... yeah, so we're working on modeling combined with production. So I would say the sentence like, "She is running," and then I would ask a student to repeat, "She is running." Like saying what I say. And if they have trouble understanding that, we might just practice with like, "Okay. Say what I say." Then I'll go, "Ooh." And then I'll point at the student and they get to say, "Ooh." And so we'll make it fun and just go back and forth until they understand what I'm asking them to do. And then, we'll start stepping it up. So we'll say, "The girl." The girl. She's running. She's running." And then we'll just build that to where we need to if they struggle with that as an activity. The only thing with modeling combined with production is that there is limited generalization based on some of the research.

So one way to, I think it's a helpful way to get started, and to train that, but there's a little bit more on evidence, and we might get a little more bang for our buck if we do imitating contrasting sentences. And the Connell 1982 article, we talked about this last week, but that article includes step by step training procedure, because this can feel a little complicated at first, but once you get it, it's really easy to implement and yeah, it's really cool to see how this comes together, and it just feels really good to be able to use the procedure in this way. So there's a number of things that we can do. So like I said, the activity is imitating contrasting sentences. So we want the child to imitate the target, and contrasting form. And so last week I linked a quick video of how exactly which targets we're using, and what that would look like. And then again, you can go to the article for more in depth overview, but I just wanted to share a couple ideas to make this work.

So we have access to a book, and it's really nice because there's like a temporal sequence in the book which makes it really easy to work on different verbs. So we can practice using them that way. We don't have to get beautiful... and in the procedure they talk about having cards, which I have a number of cards for verbs available, and same thing for nouns, but you don't have to necessarily have that. Like I really think we can make this work with a book. So we can work on the different verb tenses as we go through the story. And we can talk about, oh he is doing this now. He just blah blah blah like in the previous page, and he's going to... and so that's how you can flip through the pages, and work on those verb tenses there.

And then if you have, if you do the initial teaching with the visuals included, you'll be golden. Like you'll be good to go. And if the student gets confused at all, just prefer back to those visuals. And it works perfectly. If I'm working on plural nouns, one thing that I like to do is just make two copies of the vocabulary cards, or maybe even three copies. And if I'm doing that contrast of imitation, then I'll have like, "This is an Apple." "Here's an Apple." "Here are two apples." And we can contrast that. So that works really well there. Yeah, so I think that covers a lot of things with pronouns. It's pretty easy. We can use the same picture, but we can say, the long way and the short way, so the boy is walking, he is walking and we can contrast it that way.

There's lots of different options here. And then we can pull in Google images if we want more ideas. And then also, like I said, there's verbs cards in the membership that include like a past present future of a bunch of different verbs, regular and irregular. So if you want something that's a little more structured, particularly if the student is struggling with this skill. And that might be a helpful way to get started. And then you can move into the book. And the same goes with plural nouns and the pronouns. All that good stuff. So hopefully that helps with that. And then just a quick reminder, again, that the most effective timing of imitation is immediately prior to an activity that involves contextually uses of the same structure.

So we wanted to make sure that the student had enough exposure to the target in the first place. So we're modeling and recasting for them, and then they're ready for that imitation, but then we want to do, before we jump into a parallel story, it'd be really awesome if we could do just that quick drill again to prime that concept and get ready to go. And so yeah, that will lead us to the parallel story, which is where we're going to do things. Because the another strategy that we talked about was combining sentences and sentence expansion. But I think we'll save those for next week because that's when we're talking about later goals. And then just a couple of other ideas to switch up the drill because a lot of our students need a lot and a lot of practice with these concepts before they can be relatively independent and using these.

So I really love using visuals because then they don't have to always rely on my support, and I feel like it helps engrain the concept with them. So like I said, I always refer to the teaching visuals. I always refer to the different sorting maths and activity. Pages that I've created to work on these concepts. And they're open ended, so they can be paired with any of the activities that we talked about. And then also, the students might get bored, always looking at pictures in the book or always looking at flashcards. So I try to switch it up. And I try to find different games that give us a lot of opportunities to work on those targets.

So for the mitten there, there might be some different games that we can use. Like, I love the Toca games. So we might do and there's not always a totally perfect fit. I always try to get it to match as much as possible. But maybe for the mitten, because we're working on different animals, I might pick one of the kitchen games where we get to practice feedings different animals, or we might do the pet game, like the pet doctor where we get to take care of different animals because there were animals in the story. And I'm sure there's different snow games out there as well. But I'll use this... like I don't always have to use this, but like I said, it's nice if the student needs a lot more practice. And we just want to give them more opportunities without them wanting to run from our room.

So that's one thing that I like to do. And I love the Toca games, especially because they're very repetitive, and I can set it up in a way that we're really working because if we're doing things with characters, we can decide which pronoun we're using. We can decide which verbs we're working on and all of those different elements. And then because those are typically the targets. And it works the same if we're doing working on MLU, whatever like morphemes or structures we're working on. We'll just continue to repeat that throughout the game. So whatever it is that we choose, that's what we do. Whatever the target is, that's what we continue to repeat. And the cool thing is that the sentence pack that I was telling you about, it's in the SLP Now membership, but it also includes, like it helps you identify different structures that you might want to target based on how they typically develop. And so that can help in that target selection as well and figuring out which sentence structures we want to use, then how many morphemes we want to include in the utterance and all of that.

So that's good. But yeah, the Toca apps are super fun. There's also like those really repetitive games. I'm looking at a picture of the Pop The Pirate one. They have like a Bunny game too that just has a lot of repetitive actions. I have a game where we get to feed the pig. There's a Barbecue game. So there's a lot of those that are very repetitive. And we can make our own games too. So if we are reading The Mitten, we can get a mitten, and put animals in the mitten. We can get different toy figurines and do different things with them. Like if we're working on prepositions, or whatever it may be. We can use the story for some inspiration to continue embedding that vocabulary, but then also just switching things up and making it a little bit more interactive. And sometimes we'll just get up and move, and use the people in the group to create our sentences. And combined with the vocabulary cards, you have about five million different activity ideas just from that.

So yeah. And then sometimes I'll pull back, pull in the YouTube field trip again, and we'll practice creating sentences from that. And we've already primed the pump for that because it might've been a couple of weeks ago at this point, but they've seen that video. We've modeled and recasted for them a bunch of times. So that's another idea of what we can do to make that skilled practice just a little bit more enjoyable. So we've gone through four steps of the literacy-based therapy framework, and we're also at step four of that grammar framework. So now we're heading into the parallel story. And this is a great way to embed the different concepts that we've worked on because the students will work on retelling their story.

So with The Mitten, there are a lot of different parallel stories that we could tell. And at this point, like I said before, we'll pull in that graphic organizer that we used in step three and or four of the framework, and we'll review the story, and I'll have the students retell the story using their grammar concepts. And that'll be our particular focus, but if they're working on other goals, we'll also focus in on that. But maybe we'll just have one main focus for the retell, like let's use your pronouns this time, or let's use your past tense verbs, or let's use your irregular pronouns. Whatever the target is, that'll be the focus as they retell the story. And then so that'll be a good refresher, that step one of telling the embedded story. But then that step point of embedded practice.

But then we'll work on creating our own story, which is even more embedded practice. So I'll pull up a fresh graphic organizer, and then we'll start to create our own story and I'll ask some different questions. So maybe we can make a story about the last time they were in the snow or what they think it would be like to play in the snow, like the boy did. Or the last time they lost something, or the last time, like something that they did with their grandma, or the last time they got a gift from someone, or there's so many different options, and there's so many angles we can take. And again, this will depend on what the focus is. Like what types of vocabulary targets are we trying to work on? What are they doing in the classroom? What would be the most relevant for them? And also what are they most excited about?

And so we'll start filling in that graphic organizer based on that story. This really gets the kids talking. They're excited about creating that story. And there are more opportunities for recast. And hopefully at this point, because we've honed in on a particular target so much, hopefully they'll be using it pretty, or somewhat consistently, especially for providing visuals, and just reminding them that we want to use whatever the appropriate target is. So that's something that we can do. And then yeah, that's how it works. So we'll fill in that organizer, and then we create it into more of a story. So the organizer is more just documenting the ideas, and then there's different ways to create the parallel story. So sometimes I might just have the students retell the story and create it into a book. It just depends on timeline, and all of that.

But if I do have the ability to do that, I really like to create an actual story. So sometimes if the students are good writers, I'll just fold some pieces of paper, and put a color cover on it, and staple that, and then they'll get to write their "Book." And they get to write the sentences with all of the target forms that we talked about. Other times, we'll create a group book, and I'll type it on PowerPoint slides, and then print those off, and then I'll just print enough copies so each student gets one book. And then, we'll continue working on the targets. They can illustrate it or we'll just pull in pictures from Google images. But then as we're putting those books together, everyone is working on retelling that story using, again, all of their target forms.

So the embedded practice for me really is using the target structures in that story. And of course, we'll also listen or, when we're walking to and from the speech room, and when they're having other conversation, and when they're discussing with their peers. That all can count as embedded practice, but I think that's a really fun way to set things up and structure things and yeah, it's just a lot of fun. So yeah, just a quick recap. We just went through the five steps of the literacy-based therapy framework. So we start with a pre-story knowledge activation, then we jump into reading the story, which I picked texts that I can use in five to 10 minutes, then we do comprehension activities, then we do that structured skill practice, and then we do the parallel story.

So and this relates to what we talked about with grammar because first, we want to do a little bit of assessment, which I talked about doing at the very beginning of my session. Then I want to make sure that I teach the concept. And I typically do this towards the beginning of the Structured Skill Practice, but sometimes it does make more sense to do that at the very beginning of the unit. You get to use your clinical judgment here. But I think that I definitely do focus stimulation all throughout, which is step three. And then we've got the structured practice, which we talked about two evidence based strategies are modeling combined with production. And then imitating contrasting sentences. And because today we're focusing on earlier grammar targets. So those are the two that we talked about for today. And then we'll pull into more next week for the later grammar goals, like more complex grammar. And then we get to wrap up with embedded practice, which links up nicely with the parallel story in the literacy-based therapy unit.

So that's what we've got. Let me know... and like I said, I use a lot of materials from the SLP Now membership, like that sentence pack, the visuals for the different skills, the visuals for the unit itself. And then the book guide includes a list of different targets, like the grammar and it helps me identify are there any irregular plural nouns in the story? Which irregular past tense verbs are there? And all of that. And then there's also a sheet that helps you identify good MLU targets. So many different options. And that's what I use to put this together. And that's what helps me streamline my planning, but you can definitely use these concepts as your going through your unit and putting this together on your own.

So Google images is a fabulous resource. There's tons of other book guides out there. I would just make sure that you find units that include pictures that are specific to the book because sometimes it's just like words with other photos on there. So I think that'll help you a lot when it comes to that structured grammar practice. So Google images is a great way to get those. And yeah, that's what we've got. Let me know if you have any other questions. And we'll see you next time.

marisha-mets-about-mobile

Hi there! I'm Marisha. I am a school-based SLP who is all about working smarter, not harder. I created the SLP Now Membership and love sharing tips and tricks to help you save time so you can focus on what matters most--your students AND yourself.

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