My Journey to Create Structure

I have always been the type of person who loves structure and routine.  Shortly after starting my job as a school speech and language pathologist, I realized this profession doesn't have a whole lot of that!  Students of varying skill levels, cognitive levels, and personalities come waltzing into your room and you quickly have to give a lesson that will meet all of their needs/goals….and in 30 minutes!  An overwhelming task for sure!  It was my goal to figure out how to to structure my school year (create a "curriculum") in a way that made planning easier for me, met all of my students’ goals, and could help them practice their skills in functional contexts.  I didn't like just flying by the seat of my pants and definitely didn't believe that playing a game every single session was going to help my kids utilize their skills in the general education classroom.  Drilling isolated language skills such as phonology, semantics, pragmatics, and syntax/morphology then expecting kids to go into other environments and use those skills is just not realistic all the time.  I learned, through the Story Grammar Marker program, we need not forget about the Discourse level which bridges the gap between language and literacy.  At this discourse level, we can help kids utilize their language skills in functional contexts and hopefully allow for greater carryover into other environments.  Not all kids are ready for the discourse level right off the bat.  Students who are very low cognitively may have to do that drilling of isolated skills for a great length of time before moving to the discourse level, if ever. 

After purchasing the Story Grammar Marker program last year (realizing many of my kids needed to be working on narrative skills) and religiously reading the Mind Wing Concepts blog; I realized that I could structure my school year around their concepts/programs which are also aligned with the Common Core Standards!  This is the blog post that gave me my idea:

http://www.mindwingconcepts.com/_blog/MindWing_Concepts_Blog/post/The_Core_of_the_Common_Core_State_Standards/

Since the elementary school I work at does trimester grading periods, it was easy to divide my year into the three levels of discourse (I call them “units” with my kids) that the blog post talks about (conversation, narration, exposition).  I figured by doing this I could keep all of my language groups on the same page and actually feel a sense of direction! 

Now, this is my first year trying this sort of set up, so I definitely expect many bumps in the road as I go.  This will be a great learning experience for me!  I created this blog so anyone else who loves structure as much as I do can follow my little experiment and decide if maybe this is something they would like to do at some point!  In addition to just keeping you updated on my curriculum, I also plan to post therapy documents I have created/used, activity ideas, classroom decorating ideas, and anything else I want to share!  I hope you find something in this blog that is useful to you!