Successful Middle School Speech Therapy

My number one piece of advise for middle school speech therapy?  Don’t take it personally.  I love working with this age but it definitely helps to have a sense of humor.  Think about all the changes these students are experiencing:  

• New school
• Changing classrooms
• Increased academic demands
• Hormones
• More complex peer interactions
• Class choice

It’s that increase in independence that some students generalize into being able to “choose” to not come or participate in speech and language therapy.    This is the time when we have to start working harder at motivating some of these students.  Today I’m linking up with the frenzied SLP’s to share my tips for motivating your middle school students:

Tell them why: 

How many of your students have been in speech therapy since preschool?  Do they know what they are working on and how speech and language therapy can help them?  During the first week of school when I am making up my schedule, I take time to sit down with each student individually and review their goals.  We discuss the plan for the year and how we are going to achieve their goals.  It’s a good time to review expectations and also talk about discharge criteria.  I like to set the idea that we are partners at the beginning of the year.   Not sure what to talk about?  I found the Queen’s Speech objective binder was a great purchase to get me started.   The Speech Room News also has a fantastic set of I can documents that you could use to set your goals with students in language that they can understand.

Find out about their journey:

Ask them what they’ve done and where they have been in speech therapy.  I always take time to ask them what they have worked on in speech in the past-did they find something that worked particularly well for them-or something that didn’t?  I find about special interests-if we need to work on vocabulary or comprehension-it helps to find text that is motivating to them.  

Rethink your middle school speech therapy service model:

This is tricky depending on your caseload size.  If you have students who are still in group articulation therapy-who have been getting therapy since kindergarten-and just aren’t carrying over skills, I would consider switching them to individual therapy using a program like 5 minute articulation.  I’ve had a lot of success moving a student with “attitude” to individual therapy.  It helps when they don’t need to put on an “act” for their friends.  

Get them moving:  

These students are expected to sit and attend for most of their school day.   I try to incorporate movement into a variety of my activities.  I pair movements with my vocabulary or language activities to help them remember ideas and concepts.  I use some ball and bean bag passing exercises from a program called Ball X Vis to keep their interest.  I find small themed rugs and get plastic objects that I have them try to throw on the rug.  Check out my glow in the dark spider game HERE.  

Use media:  

I found a lot of resources online when I was working in tele practice and I find these are really motivating for my middle and high school students.  You Tube has some great wordless movies which are fantastic for working on inferencing and problem solving.  Movie previews work great for talking about main ideas and predicting.  Commercials can be great for targeting inferencing, point of view and intent.  You can see how I used a basketball commercial to target inferencing and perspective taking HERE. 

HINT:  Always preview things on line and have them set up prior to your session so you can click through to each site.   I have gotten burned a few times-once I tried searching for the movie “Babe” in a session.  You can imagine the image results that popped up on my screen.  YouTube ads can also be inappropriate.  Take the time I was going to let a client watch a One Direction video as a motivator, the preview ad was for 50 shades of Gray!  Yikes.  Luckily  I was fast and turned my computer before they could see anything. 

Use an agenda to keep them on track:  

Are any of your students masters of distraction?  Take a cue from corporate America and use a timed agenda to get your students to focus on the tasks at hand.  It’s going to seem different than what they have done before-it has a more “grown up” feel to it.  Here’s a sample agenda for a thirty minute session.  

1:00-1:05   Greetings

1:06-1:10   Inferencing video

11:10-1:20  Inferencing activity

1:20-1:25   Vocabulary speed drill

1:25-1:30   Wrap up and To Do

I like to start each session by letting my students share one thing that happened that week-and work on commenting and asking questions.  I spend a few minutes explaining our goals for the session and then we move into the activities.  I take the last 5 minutes to review what we learned.  I find it is helpful to have them tell me what we did.  Sometimes I ask them to rate our therapy session on a scale from 1 to 5.  (One being a complete waste of time-they already knew the information to 5 being this was fun and informative).  If I get a one, I usually ask for suggestions for the next session.

I hope that gave you some ideas for middle school speech therapy and how you can motivate your students.  Check back next week for some of my favorite resources for middle school speech therapy!  Do you work with middle schoolers?  Link up with the Frenzied SLPs to share your favorite materials and therapy ideas.