You spend all evening scouring the internet for the perfect activity for little Timmy. You print, you cut, you laminate, you velcro. He's gonna love it. And then it lasts all of two seconds in therapy and then he's bored. I'm speech-language pathologist Keri Clark, and in today's episode of the Speech and Language Kids podcast,
We'll be answering the question of are one-off activities really working or are they just filling time? Plus, I'm going to show you the power of having a start-to-finish plan that actually moves children toward success. Welcome to the podcast. I'm excited to have you guys here. If you are listening to this recording of the podcast, you can find the show notes for today at speechandlanguagekids.com slash chaos. That'll be today's episode. Hey, Olivia. Hey, Leanne. Welcome.
You guys can pop over into the chat inside the hub here and say hello, and I'll take your questions as we go along. If you guys would like to listen to the episode recordings live in the hub, you guys can also do that. Head on over to... hub.speechandlanguagekids.com to join us in there. All right, so today in our Wayback Machine, I want to take you back to my SLP survival kit. Does anyone remember this?
So this was, oh gosh, I don't even know what year this would have been. But this was one of my very first resources that I made that was super, super popular. Okay. And I actually just found this the other day and my son saw it, my 11 year old, and he said, SLP survival kit. What do you need to survive as an SLP? And I said, well, you just needed to survive this session. And so, oh, the video's not.
great on this um but it's basically just it's a book that i made of all of these one-off activities and it was organized by topic so you could say okay here's the speech activities here's the language activities And the idea was that if you were struggling in a session, you could just pull this out and have a ready to go activity. Leanne says my friend has it. That's amazing. Hey Kim, welcome. Yes, so.
Okay, nothing wrong with this, with my SLP survival kit, but it kind of reflects where I used to be versus where I am now in terms of this whole... therapy process and how we serve kids and how we support kids, okay? It was really, really popular. People loved it. And that was because it feels like we're all in survival mode. It feels like if we just find that perfect activity, then the kid's going to get it, right?
but it's not just about the perfect activity. It's about having a full plan from start to finish that walks them from where they are now. to where we want them to be and it's about getting them there as quickly as possible so when we're using something like a survival kit where we're just grabbing one-off activities yes it gets us through the session yes we survive the session but it's not necessarily serving them and it's not serving us because what we find is we have these kids
who are just on the caseload for years and years and years. And yes, we're doing stuff and it's probably helping, but we're not moving them to the finish line. We're just kind of stagnating, right? Do any of you feel that way in any of your sessions? Or maybe... Maybe you are not me. Maybe you totally feel on top of all of that. But I do feel like these one-off activities have.
such an allure but they have an allure and they have a problem so why let's look into this why do we love one-off activities so much Well, they're readily available. There is an entire Teachers Pay Teachers website where you can get any one-off activity you need. You type in a skill and boom, there's an activity for it or like 10 probably. They're super easy. We can just grab them and go.
They're super cute and fun looking. A lot of those that you find on Teachers Pay Teachers or on Instagram, they're so adorable, right? And they are very alluring because of that. The other piece of this is there's like a peer pressure component to it because it's what we see on social media.
Because they're catchy, right? You see a cutesy activity on social media. You go, ooh, and you look at it longer. And then the social media algorithms go, ah, people like looking at this. And so they serve it more. So these really cute, fun. activities are the ones that we see and it feels like everyone's using them and so it feels like we should be using them and we should be
coming up with new activities that are cute and fun and engaging for every single session. And it's exhausting. Guys, we're on a hamster wheel. That's not the way we wanna do it. downsides of these one-off activities is the lack of progression right so we're not having a clear path from skill introduction to skill mastery
There's so much, so much time and effort spent on the constant searching for new materials, trying to find the next activity. It takes a lot out of us, right? And we don't have much time to spare. Hey, Bianca, welcome.
Also, it's difficult to track progress. When we're using these one-off activities, they don't build on each other, so we can't be sure that we're actually progressing through the skill. And it can be overwhelming for our kids, okay? I say this a lot. People say, well, you only have one activity.
for teaching where questions and I say yes because we're going to do it over and over again. We are not going to pick a new activity to approach this every time because that can confuse our kids. It can confuse these students who Don't just pick up skills incidentally. Otherwise, they wouldn't be here, right? So they are continuing to struggle with these things because of the overwhelm, because of the inconsistency, all right? But fortunately...
There's another way to do this and I'm going to help you with that. So now we go on to the power of a start to finish plan. So if we think about what's the opposite of throwing together a bunch of one-off activities. Well, that's going to be a structured plan that takes you from introducing a skill to mastery in a systematic way.
Okay, so those of you who with me who are speech language pathologists or speech language pathology assistants, I want you to go back to your schooling. Ready? Get in your way back machine. Go back to grad school and remember the Van Riper approach, okay? This was the first approach for me that this clicked with, this idea of start to finish plans, okay? So Van Riper says if we need to teach a sound to a child, we start first in isolation.
Okay? So we need to say the S sound. We're going to say ssss. Just like that. S in isolation. Then we're going to work on S in syllables. Ssuh. Ssuh. Sue. Okay? Then we're going to go on to words. Soap. Sally, I can't think of S words for some reason right now. And we're going to move through the progressions, right? Do you remember that? Do you remember that step-by-step plan that Van Riper so nicely laid out for us? Imagine having a systematic plan like that for every skill you teach.
That's what we're talking about here. And then imagine having a systematic plan for which skills to teach in which order, okay? So we've got... layers on layers of plans that we're going to talk about today. But this idea of having a start to finish plan makes it intentional where every step is building toward mastery. It makes it predictable. So our clients know what to expect and that's going to lower their stress levels.
And it's efficient. We're not constantly scrambling to find the next activity to cut, to print, to laminate, to add the little Velcro dots. So many Velcro dots, right? And don't get me wrong. I love me some good Velcro dots. I... I have so many products with little Velcro pieces that I stuck in weird places. But the idea here is that I know you are short on time. I know you don't have time to make a cutesy activity for every session. So we can use these start to finish plans.
to move children through the phases more quickly get them back up and running and back into the classroom as quickly as possible lower our case loads it makes everything smoother okay so let's
dig into this idea of these plans. I'm going to throw out some terms here that I've been using. Yesterday actually I went into my think tank which means I uh had my husband take my children next door to my mother's house because everybody was home for a snow day and i put a shower curtain in the doorway behind me you can see that there and i put on my big headphones and i had some nice soothing music and i went into my think tank
And I said, how can I provide a structure, provide a framework that is going to allow us to... efficiently and easily teach communication skills in a variety of settings okay not just therapy but in the classroom and at home and how can we
best support our learners in all of these different environments with one simplified system that makes sense. Okay, and that's what I've been working on lately, which I'm really excited about. And I have some really big stuff that's coming very, very soon to you guys. So keep Keep tuned in because we're going to have some big announcements soon. But for now, let's start with this system, this framework, these plans, okay? So we're going to talk about two types of start to finish plans.
So the first one I'm calling a therapy pathway. And this is a sequence of skills that you teach to treat or support a specific challenge. So I'm going to give you an example from one of my friend's kids. She has a daughter who's in middle school and she's struggling to get her work turned in on time. She has anxiety and ADHD. And so those two things are making it very hard for her to use executive functioning skills to get those things in on time. Okay. So a therapy pathway.
that we could build might include things like some emotional regulation for knowing when we're feeling stressed out and how to manage those big feelings. That's a whole skill that we would work on, right? But then once we've got that, okay, what's another skill? How about planning out a task from start to finish and breaking it down into manageable steps?
Awesome. That's another skill that we could teach. And then a third skill that we might teach along that same pathway would be... um the execution right the time management how do we break up our time how do we set reminders those kinds of things right so they're all executive functioning skills but we're putting them together in a pathway that we can follow right
uh maybe we're thinking about let's think about stuttering okay so a child who stutters maybe they need to work on coordinating their breathing with their speech because they're they're gasping for air in the middle of their sentence and having trouble coordinating the breath okay that's what that might sound like so we need to work on coordinating their breathing
We also need to deal with some negative emotions that are popping up because of their stuttering, some anxiety about stuttering, and then we need to teach them some actual stuttering modification strategies that they can use when they're in a moment of stuttering. Okay, so that's the pathway. The pathway is the bigger picture of where we're going and how we're going to get there.
Now the plans is what I'm calling the other one, the therapy plans or therapy plan modules, because the modules are the specific skills that we're going to plug into our pathway to get us. through it, okay? So they're the specific therapy lessons for specific skills that they need to master. And so a good therapy plan for a child is going to include both of these. We're going to think of them as the forest and the trees. The pathway...
is made up of a whole bunch of therapy plan modules okay all right so let's talk about how do we make a therapy pathway and those of you who are in the hub with me live if you have any questions or comments please put those in the chat i love taking those as we go along All right, so take a look at where this child, this individual, this teenager, whatever age we're working with, take a look at where they are now. How are they communicating?
Where are they struggling? What are the individual skills that they would need to learn to overcome that particular challenge? And if you're not sure, we now have our progress monitoring tools and our screening checklist. inside the Hub and those are available with a free plan. So go to hub.speechandlanguagekids.com and you will find checklists. Okay, so this is not you having to come up with this out of thin air.
there is a checklist that will say, are they struggling with this? Are they struggling with this? You're just checking boxes, and then based on which boxes are checked, by parents, by teachers, by classroom aides, by other therapists, by the speech-language pathologist based on the assessment results. All of us are going to work together to say, okay, here's where we're seeing these problems.
And that translates to a specific challenge that this child is having, okay? And we're going to map out which skills are needed to overcome that challenge. all right so let's say that this child is struggling with reading comprehension okay what we can do is we can make a therapy pathway that includes the specific skills needed
to address reading comprehension. And that's going to look different for every student. So we're going to plug in the modules that make sense for this student. Maybe this student really struggles with decoding words, sounding them out. Okay, so we say, well, if you can't sound out the words, it's really hard to understand what you're reading, right? So decoding could be one of the skills, one of the therapy plan modules that we're plugging into this pathway.
Maybe another one is that they are struggling with vocabulary. They don't understand the specific vocabulary words being used in the text. Okay, that's another therapy plan we can plug in there. Some vocabulary skills, right?
maybe they're also struggling with understanding the form of a narrative, right? Like the sequencing and that piece of it, or how does one use main idea and details to create an informational piece so maybe they're struggling with the structure of the writing and that could be another piece that we're plugging in right so think about the challenge figure out what that is use our um
progress monitoring tools if you need some help, and then think of the individual skills needed to build that pathway. Okay, that's your therapy pathway. Now, how do we make an individual therapy plan? So now we're going to dig down to one skill. one specific skill that they need to work on. and we're going to work on how we can teach that individual skill from start to finish and each of those will be your individual therapy plans so again think about where they are now with that skill
and where you want them to be. And then create a step-by-step plan that's going to walk you through teaching them the skill, okay? So there's two ways that I like to do this. One is to provide supports. and remove them as you go along. So you say, okay, how much support do I need to give you to be able to do this skill? So the one I really like, let's see, wait. Oh, I have a different one.
I'm going to give you, yeah, I'm going to give you the where questions one first because that's the one I always use and I think it makes it very clear. Okay, so where questions? Oh, sorry. Nope, I know where I was going with this. Okay, sorry.
providing supports and removing them as you go along okay so initiating interactions let's say the skill that they need to learn is how to initiate an interaction okay so how much support are they going to need in order to initiate an interaction successfully okay for this child I'm going to have to provide a verbal and picture model. So I'm going to show them a picture that says my term.
Let's say that one because that's a really simple way to initiate an interaction. So we're going to show them a picture that says my turn and has a kid doing this and I'm going to say my turn and have them repeat it. Okay. So that's the most support I can provide to make you successful independent or not independently, but with that support. Okay. You can initiate an interaction if I say it and you say it back to me and I show you the picture.
Then we're going to fade that support back to just the picture and a partial prompt. So maybe I'm going to say and I'm going to start it. If they're still struggling, I go, my. And then we get, oh, my turn, okay? And then they see the picture. Then we're going to fade to just the pictures. And I'm just showing you the picture. I'm not saying anything. I'm just pointing at the picture.
And you're remembering my turn. And then maybe just a reminder ahead of time. Oh, look at that fun toy he has. Remember what you can say if you want to turn. And then he goes in and he says my turn, right? So we... Add as many supports as we need to make you successful, and then we gradually fade them back. So that's one way to create a step-by-step plan for learning a skill.
The other way then is the where questions. So this is making the skill easier and then building up the difficulty level as you go along. okay so the first one we still wanted them to do the same thing but we were providing support now we're actually making the skill easier
So the one I use for this is where questions. So what is the very first type of where question that you ever see a baby do? Right? It's where's your nose? And they point to their nose. Where's mommy? And they point to mommy. Okay. So we're going to start by just having them answer where questions by pointing on themselves. And then the next harder level of that would be pointing somewhere else, not on their body, but to a person or a thing, right?
Then we want to bump it up a little bit more, make it a little bit harder. So we're going to give them two choices and have them verbally say the answer to a where question. For this one, I like to use a farm. and a barn and a dollhouse because that's always what I had in my therapy space, but it could be anything. And you have a cow, the farmer, whatever, and you put the cow on the barn and you say, where is he? Barn or house?
Barn and now you put him on the house. Where is he? Barn or house? House. And so now we're just answering with either the word barn or the word house. Very simple.
okay and then we just keep increasing the challenge level okay now i want you to say i'm gonna hide a ball somewhere in the room and i you i say where is it and you say on the chair okay and so now we're using more words, we're having more options, and eventually we work up to hypothetical questions like where do you sleep, things like that, okay?
So that's the two ways that you can make individual therapy plans. Providing supports and removing them as you go along or making the skill easier and building up the difficulty level as you go along. Make sense? Okay, but have you ever wondered, where could I get some pre-made therapy plans? I'm so glad you asked. Why am I so passionate about this? Because this is what I am spending all of my time on right now, and I'm so excited, okay?
So the therapy plans, we have over 100 of those already in the hub. And those are exactly what I explained before. Breaking a skill down into a step-by-step plan, providing you the resources to practice it over and over and over again in a way that builds. till mastery. Okay. The other piece of this that I'm working on right now is the pathways. So I want my vision is to have a pathway for every main challenge that you will come across.
in our profession right so this child has trouble retelling past events that make any sense at all awesome here's a therapy pathway and here's the individual therapy plan modules you would plug in to teach it okay uh they're having trouble with
speech intelligibility awesome here's our here's our pathway here's our plans okay so I want I am building all of this out now and that is going to be showing up in the hub over the next couple of weeks we'll be pushing that forward as fast as possible so I'm really about that so you guys can access those as well so if you want access to any of that therapy plans pathways any of the support that comes with it you can head on over to speech hub
speechandlanguagekids.com to access those. You will be able to access the progress monitoring tools and the screening checklist in the free version. But if you want to get to the therapy plans and the pathways, you will need a paid version for that. It's $25 a month or $250 a year. So very manageable. But if you have any questions, I'm in there too. So you can message with me and ask. questions and I'll be happy to help you as well.
Okay, my friends, I'm going to go ahead and wrap it up here. But as usual, pop on over into the hub. Let me know what questions you have. Let me know what therapy plans or pathways you'd like to see as we're building this out. and it'll all be trickling down soon along with a lot more exciting stuff coming hopefully this summer or maybe even a little sooner. So stay tuned and we'll have more for you soon. Bye for now. Have a great day.