One thing that we do quite a lot of as speech therapists in Britain is writing targets and programmes for school staff and/or parents to work on. I am fortunate enough to see most of my clients on a weekly or fortnightly basis now, as I work independently. Even before that, I did quite a […]
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 […]
We all struggle to talk about how we feel. It’s complicated and often difficult to find the words that most clearly express what we want to say. This is even more difficult for children, and especially children with language difficulties. There are so many words to describe feelings and they often have subtly different meanings […]
As children move through school often their language difficulties can sometimes become more subtle. At first glance they seem to be able to respond to questions and can express themselves in longer sentences, but when things become more complex they can start to become confused. One of the things that can particularly trip up children […]
Exams are a reality for every child going through education. Things have changed a lot in recent years and a lot is done through teacher assessment and coursework, but sooner or later, everyone has to pass an exam. This is a stressful situation for any student, but a child with a language difficulty has even […]
“Vocabulary levels are strong predictors of later literacy skills. They predict not only how well children will develop reading comprehension, but also their phonological awareness and phonic knowledge. Vocabulary level at age five has been found to be the single best predictor of whether a child brought up in poverty will escape poverty in adult […]
Memory is a complex thing and has been the subject of lots of research. We all find some types of information easier to remember than others. Some people are great at remembering faces, others seem to have an almost inexhaustible capacity to remember dates. I’m sure most people reading this can identify things they find […]
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 […]
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 […]
I do a lot of work with junior age children (age 7-11 for anyone not in the UK) with comprehension and expressive language problems. It’s always a challenge to find materials at the right level and targeting the right skills. I find that the way things look at this age is really important – the […]
