It was Helen who told me about Carrie Clark’s podcasts and website – Speech and Language Kids. I have just downloaded all the podcasts and have been listening to them whilst driving between appointments! The podcasts are FANTASTIC!! Go and listen to them. Even as an experienced therapist, Carrie has ideas that I hadn’t tried […]
As speech therapists, we spend much of our time talking about, thinking about and using words. Vocabulary is so important when encouraging a child’s language skills; whether you are waiting for those words, or trying to improve sentences for SATS test, a good vocabulary is key. Verbs are one of the main building blocks in […]
Last week, Helen started writing about formal assessments and in particular the CELF-4 (Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals – 4). You can read that post here. This assessment is one of the most widely used assessments in the UK, particularly when gathering information for Statements (or EHCP’s) or to decide if children meet the criteria […]
Helen and I have started this series of post to show how you can use everyday toys in therapy. Although there are some fantastic speech therapy specific resources and toys out there, you don’t need to spend lots of money to support your child’s speech and language skills. You just need to keep in mind […]
When Speech and Language Therapists assess younger children’s understanding of language, we often refer to ‘Key words’ or ‘Information Carrying Words – ICW’s’. ICW’s is a term originally used by the Derbyshire Language Scheme, 1982, Knowles, W and Masidlover, M. Both of these terms refer to the number of words you need to understand to […]
I had a real life experience of vocabulary learning this week. We have been musing for a while on the idea of changing this little blog into a self-hosted blog to give us the opportunity to do more with it. I may have lost some of you already?…. Having decided that now was the time […]
Over the past few weeks, I have been into several schools/nurseries to observe children. It’s something speech and language therapists often do, especially at the assessment stage, but I can understand that it probably seems like a strange thing to spend a session doing, sitting and watching! So I thought today I’d write about what […]
Many of the children I work with (especially those at junior age) have difficulty with word-finding. This is something that we all experience occasionally, so I think everyone reading this will be able to identify with how frustrating it can be at times. You know that “tip of the tongue” feeling that you get sometimes […]
Our next column on the brilliant Special Needs Jungle website is up now. The topic is how to communicate succesfully with children with unclear speech and you can check it out here. Do let us know what you think, either here or there. Also, if you missed our last column about the impact of language […]
Several times over the past few weeks, I’ve been talking to parents about how they can use visual support to help their children’s communication. This is one of those things that speech and language therapists bang on about all the time (!) but I don’t know how much sense we make to other people sometimes. […]
