Helen and I were thrilled when Sue O’Malley, Specialist Speech and Language Therapist offered to write a post about Semantic feature analysis. It isn’t something I have used ….yet, but it looks really useful and I will be trying this soon! You can find out more about Sue on her website www.chattertutor.co.uk. Here is her […]
Many of the children I work with (especially those at junior and secondary age) have word-finding difficulties. It’s a term you often see written in speech therapy reports. But what exactly does this mean and how can you help? What is a word-finding difficulty? Basically, a word-finding difficulty is exactly what it sounds like – […]
Is your school taking part in No Pens Day Wednesday on 4th October? In case you haven’t heard of this, it is an initiative started by The Communication Trust which does just what it says on the tin – a whole day of teaching when no-one picks up a pen! This year will be the […]
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) […]
This is the next in our series of posts about narrative therapy. You can see the introduction, Part 1 – Who/character and Part 2 – Where/setting by clicking on the links. Today we are talking about the “when” or time of stories. Talking about the time in a story is important as part of setting […]
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 […]
We changed the clocks on Saturday night and now it’s officially British Summer Time. It will be Easter next weekend, and that must mean it’s spring. Yet I had my winter coat on today!… Time concepts are very difficult for many children to grasp, especially children with language difficulties. The vocabulary for the seasons and […]
I love this time of year, except the getting dark really early bit! There are so many different things happening that prove to be great opportunities for discussion with children. We have just had Hallowe’en and Bonfire Night is only a few days away and then before you know it, Christmas will arrive! Then you […]
“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 […]
