Entertainment Break!!

Here are my high school dancers performing my routine at a girls basketball game last week:

Does anyone else out there coach a dance team?!  I would love to know how your season is going and maybe see some videos too! :)

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Conversation Unit Reflection

So I have mixed feelings about my Conversation Unit....

For those of you who haven't read previous posts, the focus of my first trimester was on conversation, based on MindWing Concepts program/materials.  I used their Facilitating Relationship manual to guide my assessments, lessons, and goals.  

My initial assessments went pretty well.  I followed the assessment guide in the manual as I looked at three specific things with regard to clarification skills- Repairing Receptive Conversational Breakdowns, Repairing Expressive Breakdowns, and Preventing Expressive Breakdowns.  I recorded the conversations on my iPad for later analysis.  To be honest, the beginning of the school year was so busy I didn't really get around to scoring all of my assessments that I took so much time completing :(.  It definitely requires a lot of time to listen to all of the recordings again and keep track of all the different areas.  

For the intervention aspect of it, we learned about Six-Second Stories (a sentence containing who, did what, where, and when) and the kids did really begin to latch on to the concept and loved using the Story Grammar Marker tool to help them.  We learned the 4 SGM icons used to tell a Six Second Story (character, action, setting-where, setting-when) and had a discussion about why we must include all of those things when we begin a conversation with other people.  

To teach the kids how to Repair Receptive Breakdowns, I would tell them a Six Second Story WITHOUT one of the 4 elements. So I might say, "Maria rode her bike to the store" (purposefully leaving out the WHEN).  The kids would fill out their Six Second Story Therapy Sheet (4 boxes labeled Who, Did What, Where, When) and figure out which element I missed.  They would then have to ask me the appropriate question to get that piece of information.  So in my example above they would be expected to ask "WHEN did Maria ride her bike to the store?"  We specifically talked about appropriate questions for each element prior to this activity.  Eventually, I faded out the use of the visual therapy sheet and they had to mentally determine which element I omitted and ask the appropriate question.  Many of the groups got really good at this skill.  It allowed them to Prevent Breakdowns (knowing they had to include all 4 elements) as well as Repairing Receptive Breakdowns.  Those two topics took longer than I had intended, therefore we did not get to Repairing Expressive Breakdowns.  The manual explained for instruction in that area, the SLP would teach the child to read body language of their communication partner to determine confusion and need for clarification.  

I guess what I realized after this unit was that even though many of my kids leave out important information in conversations and have trouble with requesting clarification, this unit would be more beneficial for students with autism, Aspergers, etc.  I would have loved to do this in a social skills group, but unfortunately I do not have one of those this year!

If anything, the kids learned how to write a good sentence, which is something the majority of them didn't previously know how to do!

Oh well, lesson learned.  On to the Narrative/Expository Units! :)

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