Hey, guys! It’s back-to-school time for me which means it’s
also time to plan for therapy. Like many school-based SLPs, I have typically
used themes to plan for my groups. Themes are great because they make it easy
to find activities for a variety of goals using one idea. For early elementary
school, themes such as autumn, back-to-school, and apples are being used in the
classroom as well which helps carryover. Many older students have
background knowledge of those same themes which allows me to target skills
based on what they already know.
On the other hand…using the same themes year after year (16 years
in my case) can get REALLY boring. After using an apple theme one September for
what seemed like the millionth time, I was more than ready for a change, and so were some of the students I kept more than a year. However,
I still wanted to facilitate carryover, scaffold easily, and make therapy plans
simple.
Lucky for me, I share an office with my favorite SLPs and we
are able to bounce ideas off each other frequently. Like me, they were also
tired of the same old themes, but wanted to keep the good things about theme planning.
After talking about it and searching Pinterest, we developed some new theme
ideas which also allow for those three important characteristics of therapy
planning: carryover, scaffolding, simple! Of course, we still pull out the some of the other themes occasionally, but having a few new ones helps keep things fresh.
In July, I published a blog post about using a “Dog Days”
theme in speech therapy. It's a great theme for August, and you can find it here. If, you are ready for some new therapy
themes, I plan to write about several of them in upcoming posts. Be sure to
sign up for my newsletter to be notified when they are published! Have a great
August!
