Negatives are a really important thing to understand and always a high priority for me to target if a child is struggling with them. If you don’t know that there’s a difference between “push” and “don’t push” you can immediately see that it can lead to all sorts of problems! The first thing to do […]
We have written posts about teaching other early concepts – colour and prepositions. But today we are going to think about the early size concepts of big and little. Just before I start, there are a couple of points I want to run through. Firstly, there is the choice of words. Speech Therapists all tend […]
Grammar can be very tricky for some children. This is hardly surprising when you think about it – there are so many rules about how sentences fit together. A lot of these centre around verbs (action words). Take a simple verb such as “jump”. We change this depending on the sentence. You might say […]
I know personally that food shopping is something I dread. It’s busy and I hate the way supermarkets move things around so you can’t find them! I also know that for many parents the idea of taking children with you is even worse! But, sometimes if you can involve your children in the activity you […]
Many children find the temporal concepts of before and after hard. They are tricky as they change depending on where in the sentence they are, making the rules harder to learn. You will also often find it set as a target. So how can you teach a child before and after? As before and after are […]
Adjectives are really important words in a sentence. For example, think about these three sentences: The man took a walk through the forest. The old man took a long walk through the dark forest. The elderly man took a meandering walk through the gloomy forest. The first sentence makes sense but the adjectives (describing words) […]
Helen and I have been writing a series of posts about using narrative therapy. If you haven’t read those yet I recommend that you go and have a look first. Today I am going to write about bringing all the story elements together and using whole stories in your therapy. I really love this bit […]
Today I’m going to talk about inferencing. This is one of those words that we use a lot as speech therapists and teachers use a fair bit as well, but I don’t think it means a lot to other people! It means understanding things which aren’t directly stated. This is something we all do all […]
This is the next in our series of posts about narrative therapy. If you have missed the other posts, do check out these links – introduction, who, where, when, what happened. In the last post in this series, Elizabeth talked about the “what happened” of the story. Obviously this is quite a large portion of […]
Well, in typical British bank holiday form, it is indeed raining cats and dogs today! But I thought I would grab the bull by the horns, put pen to paper and write this post. These are just some of the fantastic idioms we have in the English language and that can cause real confusion for children […]
