BUILDING effective communicators: the one who requires a flow chart to comprehend:

The one who requires a flow chart to comprehend:  

This client  is able to share different information but doesn’t know how to sequence it.  They start in the middle of the story and jump around trying to give me all of the information.  I have to ask more questions to figure out what they are trying to tell me.  If I ask them how their weekend was they may something like, “I spilled the popcorn but it was okay because everything was awesome and Professor business is a super bad guy but then he was okay.”

Poor Sequencing abilities:  These students may have difficulty with sequencing the order of events or activities.  I usually start by working on simple 3-4 step crafts or recipes.  We can write each step down and then put the cards in order at the end of the activity.  We also practice sequencing cards of familiar daily activities.  We spend a lot of time working on time concepts such as before/after and first/then.  As they improve, we start to work on story recall.

Poor Time Conceptualization:  I think these clients also struggle with time concepts.  We work on sorting time concepts (ex. which one is longer one day or one month) and identifying time concepts on calendars.   (Which day is yesterday, find a month, where is next month etc.)  We write our therapy activities or big events (school field trips, birthdays) on our shared calendar so we can talk about what has happened and what will happen.

Difficulty Self Monitoring:  This client may not be attending to whether his or her listener is understanding what they are saying.  We work on recording ourselves and listening to see if what we said makes sense.  Did we start at the beginning and continue through until the end?

No Internal map for how to retell a story:  This client benefits from graphic organizers and structured practice on how to retell a story.  We might start with very simple narratives that include where you were, who was there and what you did.  As they become more successful with providing the basic information, we start to expand to include other details or more complex sentence structures.

What activities do you use to work with students with sequencing problems?  I’d love to hear about it below!   Tomorrow I am linking up with Gray Matter Speech Therapy for my first Research Tuesday Post.  On Thursday, I have the last in this series:  the one who makes you play Mad Libs®.

If you liked this post, I’d be grateful if you would share it with others by using the Facebook or Pinterest buttons listed below.