Best of the Best: 5 Books that Changed my life-well my therapy life anyhow.

I think I've mentioned that I'm a hoarder.  And a half book reader.  And I may not vacuum weekly.  I have some faults. But I LOVE to read and spend probably too much time reading books about speech language pathology, education and learning styles.  (well I read at least half of the book.)  

These books are books that I've read that have resulted in a change in my therapy or therapy approach.  They are books that I've recommended to parents, colleagues and have lugged around with me while I read them.  My coworkers make fun of me because I'm always bringing some therapy book home with me on the weekends.  Most of the time it stays in my car-I probably spend more times carrying the books than I do reading them.  

Here are 5 Books that Changed my Life or at least my therapy life.

1.  Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction

I've mentioned this one before but it bears repeating.  This is a fantastic text on vocabulary instruction and how to teach and make it meaningful for your students.  I'm so happy that the uber creative Jenn from Crazy Speech World posted about this.  You can read her post HERE.  

2.  Nurturing Narratives:  

One of the more eye opening things about having children, is realizing how quickly they really do pick up language.  Sequencing is one of my go-to goals because I want them to be able to retell a story or share an experience.  But many of the children I see, don't have a basic framework to do this. If you ask them about their weekend, they need so much prompting to share information.  This book provides a framework for teaching story retell as well as personal narratives.  It focuses on building up different language skills within the framework of story telling.

3.  The Child and Adolescent Stuttering Treatment and Activity Resource Guide

I am not a fluency expert and in the 18 years or so that I have been practicing, I've only worked with a handful of dysfluent clients.  I had a particularly stressful evaluation which left me in tears and a colleague recommended this textbook.  It is filled with practical information related to assessment and treatment with a ton of activity suggestions as well as specific information related to communicating with parents.  This book is super expensive since it is a textbook-but you could try textbook exchange websites to try to purchase it.  

4.  Successful R Therapy

This book is ahhh-mazing.  Lots of suggestions for assessing, teaching /r/ and carryover activities.  I've seen Pam Marshalla present on /r/ and /s/ therapy-this was a great book to bring home to add to my collection.

I read it but I don't get it:  Comprehension Strategies for Adolescent Readers.  

I heard about this book at a Social Thinking course.  I don't teach reading but I do work a lot on auditory comprehension and find myself with goals focusing on main ideas and details.  The author is someone who had difficulty with reading comprehension when she was younger.  The book focuses on successful strategies that good readers use to comprehend texts.  I find that some of these strategies work well when working on auditory comprehension too.  This is a quick book that is easy to read.  It's a great one to recommend to parents when they report their children are having difficulty because it's written in a parent friendly format.

Those are my top 5.  It was actually pretty hard to narrow it down to just 5.  What are your favorite books, I'd love to hear about it below!  If you enjoyed this post, please take some time to share it with others by clicking on the Pinterest or Facebook buttons below.

Best of the Best: CEU version.

To be honest, I rarely have met a CEU course I haven't liked.   It's so exciting to go back to work after a great CEU course with some new tools or new perspective on some of your clients.  Or sometimes you just get validation-like when the presenter explains something or suggests an activity and you think, "Hey, I've been doing this already."  I wasn't lucky enough to take 5 CEU courses this year so I am going to write down 5 courses that I would highly recommend if you have the funds or if they come to your area. 

1.  PROMPT: Introductory and Bridging.  Great if your caseload consists of lots of nonverbal, preverbal or kids with Childhood Apraxia of Speech.  Although most people equate this approach with the tactile facial cues, I really found that I use it more as a another framework to think about articulation and how we produce our sounds.   I like the option of having some tactile cues to help out kids who need extra cues but fade them pretty quickly.  I also really like the fact that they encourage you to work on these word lists/choices during functional activities.  I think this is a little harder to implement in the group setting though.
2.  Kaufman Apraxia Approach.  Nancy Kaufman is an engaging speaker. This is another great course if you work with younger children.   I use this approach with a lot of my preverbal kids and have good success.  One thing that I really like is how you build up the language skills and then go back to fine tune individual sounds. 
3.  Floortime/Scerts Model.  I went to both of these courses and find the information is vital to anyone working with children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorders.  Some of the information overlaps, so if you've been to one I'd wait a few years before taking another one.
4.  Incredible Flexible You: Preschool Social Thinking course I took this course this year and found it to be SO helpful.  If you struggle with what's appropriate or expected for this age in terms of social language, this is the course for you.  The speakers were engaging and had great practical ideas for teaching. This is a great companion to the Social thinking courses. 
5.  Sarah James: Vocabulary course through Bureau of Education Research.  A good speaker for vocabulary and literacy.  She has fun and practical ideas to build literacy,  narrative and vocabulary skills.  Plus some really fun ideas for using poetry in sessions. 


Tomorrow I'm talking about my favorite books/resources.  What CEU courses did you find most valuable?  I'd love to hear it below. 

Best of the Best: Top 5 Week: Apps Edition

One of my favorite things at the end of the year is all of the Top 10 lists that come out.  I love lists.  I used to read the "Book of Lists" in school.  I even have an old cassette tape somewhere with the top 100 hits of 1986.  Who remembers what the number one song was?  I meant to do this in December, but it's awards season, so I figure it's still okay to put them out.

Stop by each day this week for a new "Top 5 list."

Last December I wrote a post about my top 10 favorite speech and non speech related apps.  You can check out that post HERE.

I haven't used my iPad as much this year since my son stepped on it.  It still works but the spider webbing cracks makes it a lot less fun.  Still, that hasn't stopped me from getting some pretty cool new apps.

Although this is my top 5 week, I ended up choosing 8 apps that I purchased this year.

1.  Odd Ones Out by Lucky Gecko apps  I heard about this from another blog but I forgot which one. Since I am in middle/high school, this is a fun, quick app to work on what does not belong with my students.  We also discuss WHY we chose the one we did.  
2.  Fun with Verbs and Sentences by Hamaguchi Apps  I love this app for early sentence building and syntax.  You can work on subject-verb-object or subject-verb-preposition.  The child chooses which character they want (boy/girl/bear,) what the character will do and what they are doing it with or where they are located.  Then a corresponding movie related to the sentence plays.  Afterwards, the child is prompted to state the sentence.  One of my favorite features is that you can choose your verb tense (present progressive, regular past tense, irregular past tense or random.)
3.  Word Vault by Home-Speech-Home  This a great resource for a variety of therapy targets.  It has lists for articulation, phonology, language targets, and social/problem solving.  This is a fantastic resource for any therapist-especially one who travels to different locations.
4.  Zones of Regulation by Selosoft, Inc  This app is a companion for the Zones of regulation program.  Your character moves around a street and goes into colored bubbles or zones and answers questions related to the Zones terminology.  You gain coins for each correct answer that you can use to buy things in the store. 
5.  Talking Train by All4mychild   This is a simple app which uses a train graphic to support students in conversation, sequencing and main idea/details.  Write the topic on the engine and then include three details on the cards.  There is also an option to record your voice. 
6.  Apraxia 2 syllables by NACD  I have the other 2 apps from NACD.  This lets you choose words based on place of articulation.  For example you could work on bilabial-bilabial words or bilabial-alveolar. 
7.  Listen Close Articulation by Erik X Raj  I have several of his apps and find them to be great for my middle to high school students.  I just bought this one so I haven't used it a lot.  This app is similar to game of Simon.  You get 4 words and the a screen comes up with 4 faces.   It starts with one word and then the next turn is 2 words.  You continue on remembering the sequence as you state your artic words.  One of the things that I really like about this app is that it helps with carryover of skills.  In order to be successful, the student has to focus on the sequence of the words vs. completing focusing on how they are producing the words.
8.  Describe it to Me by Smarty Ears.  When you start the game, you get a picture.  You choose which question you want the child to answer about the object: (category, function, parts, location, what it looks like and extra questions)  You can choose between receptive tasks with 4 multiple choice answers or expressive with options.  It also comes with homework sheets which I've never seen in an app before. 

Have you gotten any new apps?  What were your favorites for this year.  I'd love to hear about it.  As always, if you liked this post or thought there was good information please consider sharing on Facebook or Pinterest by clicking on the buttons below.