Monday, November 12, 2018

Progress Monitoring Resources for Speech-Language Therapy

About a two months ago (hard to believe) I was considering some new goals for a middle school student. I was feeling at a loss in terms of what I could use to monitor present levels. I have some tools that are quite effective, (my freebies are here and here) but I wanted to progress monitor his word finding skills and what I created just didn't cut the muster. I also have some progress monitoring tools I purchased and truth be told, I'm not thrilled with them.  So what to use?

I remembered some books that I used to use ALL. THE. TIME. When new materials become available my tried and true resources get relegated to the back of the cabinet. How sad! As I considered what I had available, I pulled out these materials that are perfect for progress monitoring all manner of targets. Here are a few I will be using now: HELP: Handbook of Exercises for Language Processing, Language Remediation and Expansion: 100 Skill Building Reference Lists, and BESST: Book of Exercises for Successful Semantics Teaching.Why purchase something new, when I already have great resources? These books contain wonderful lists for many, many language goal areas.





There are other sources like these that I think would be extremely useful when progress monitoring including this from Academic Communication Associates, Word Retrieval Activities for Children and these beauties from Thinking Publications.  I haven't used these in years and actually had to retrieve the Warm-up and Working Out books from my attic (did you notice I inventory all my materials?). I believe I bought the Warm-up books when I was I member of the mail order Speech Pathology Book Club! Who remembers that one?
It occurred to me as I was searching for what I thought I needed, that I need search no further than my therapy cupboards. I don't need anything newfangled, I don't need to buy anything else. I need to actually use what I have, because you know what? It's good stuff!

How about you? What do you already have that you can breathe new life into? 


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