ASHA Recap

I was happy to attend and present at ASHA in my hometown of Boston this past week! I am still suffering from what we call the #ashahangover, despite being able to drive to the convention center. It is still as always an exhausting and overwhelming three days with a lot to absorb!

In one of my sessions I again presented on the strategic pairing of picture books and apps/web resources to establish context, this time emphasizing how SLPs can integrate science and social studies contexts. This could be with the goal of improving comprehension and expression of macrostructure (story grammar and expository text structures) or micro elements. See my slide below re: social studies summarizing the work of Fang (2012):

Additionally, when we look at our state standards, we can see the connections between content objectives and what we could call language underpinnings (see the work of Wallach and Ehren via ASHAWire)

To take a specific pairing, I presented Scot Ritchie's great Look Where We Live: A First Book of Community Building. This book literally explores community buildings, but more deeply ideas of civics and how people in a community help one another, providing good social studies connections but also social cognition concepts.

As a pairing idea, take Google Earth (via the app on your iPad or Google Chrome, free). Construct a lesson where you "travel" to an example of each of the buildings listed in the book, but within your community. Students can be prompted to describe what they see, and you can produce model narratives about your experiences with these places, in order to elicit the same from your students. A good post-post activity would be to create a map of these places on paper, thus targeting spatial concepts and visual organization (executive function experts such as Sarah Ward stress that map making of different spaces can develop situational awareness and planning).