What's Happening in Speech?
May is Better Speech and Hearing Month!!!
This is a month designated to bring about increased awareness of the role of Speech-Language Pathologists in improving the lives of students.
Speech Pathologists work with children to improve the following skills:
Articulation and Phonology- the ability to pronounce speech sounds or speech patterns. Difficulty in this area may results in spelling errors, trouble learning new vocabulary, as well as difficulty reading. Students and teachers will likely have trouble understanding what the student is saying. The older a student is the more likely an articulation deficit will impact his or her self-confidence.
Expressive Language- The ability to express thoughts, feelings and ideas verbally or in writing. Difficulty with expressive language skills may affect the student's ability to string words together in sentences, tell stories, or provide clear information to others. These students will likely experience difficulty participating in classroom discussions and conversations with others.
Receptive Language- The ability to understand what others are saying. Difficulty with receptive language may impact a students ability to follow directions in the classroom, recall details from lessons and participate in classroom activities.
Fluency- The smoothness in which sounds, syllables, words, and phrases are joined together when speaking. Students who experience difficulty with fluency (often is referred to as stuttering) may be reluctant to speak to peers and teachers, respond to questions, or participate in discussion.
Pragmatics- The use oflanguage in social contexts. Knowing what to say, how to say it, and when to say it. Difficulty with pragmatics skills often results in poor peer relationships. Children with pragmatic language deficits often do not understand the social aspects of communication and do not appropriately interpret others' intents.
Voice- the production of sound using the vocal mechanism. Areas of vocal production include quality, pitch, nasality and volume. Students who exhibit voice problems may have difficulty speaking and being understood by others.
Look at what we're learning!
Articulation/Fluency
Most of the kids I've worked with throughout this school year are already working on their sounds at the conversation level. In order to work on this we are attempting acting!!! Several groups are acting out the story of Cinderella and others are acting out The Little Red Hen. My articulation and fluency students love acting as they pretend to be someone else and use expression that they would normally have difficulty exhibiting.
 
Students who are new to speech therapy are working on exercises to increase lingual strength so they can better articulate the specific sounds they are working on. These students are working on a set of drill words and tongue twisters as well.
Syntax/Grammar for Expressive Language
Many of my third graders are learning to speak and write irregular past tense verbs.
Examples:
catch-caught
buy-bought
bring-brought
fight-fought
Vocabulary/Language
Many of my fifth graders are busy reading Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events. As Count Olaf's evil plan unfolds we are learning great vocabulary words and figurative language. We are predicting and summarizing while we read each of the thirteen chapters in the first book, The Bad Beginning.
Some of the words we have learned recently are:
dilapidated
nuptial
nefarious
illegible
fiendish
Ask your child to use each of these words in a sentence. I think you'll be surprised!
Soon we will begin working on persuasive expressive language by creating a commercial for Lemony Snicket's series!
Pragmatics
Several of my fifth graders will begin a unit on understanding and using humor. We will learn what makes a joke or riddle funny and write a few of our own! Next time you visit this web page you may find a joke written by your child.
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