Overview
My lessons will vary greatly from class to class and student to student within any given school day, according to the specific needs of individual students, i.e. their unique speech and/or language deficits and their Individualized Education Plans (IEPs). A child's IEP outlines very specific objectives/goals the SLP will work to help the child meet, and, in essence, serves as the ongoing lesson plan for that child. Within an elementary school setting, a speech-language pathologist works to help children remediate difficulties associated with many different communication areas, including, but not limited to, speech articulation, speech fluency (stuttering), voice disorders, hearing impairment, and deficits to receptive and/or expressive language abilities. The variability of these sub-areas of communication necessitates great variability in therapeutic approach.
While serving to clinically treat disorders of speech and language, the school-based speech-language pathologist simultaneously endeavors to facilitate student success in the general education curriculum. I typically incorporate into speech therapy sessions particular lesson plan objectives set by the general education teams from week to week (based upon the core curriculum), according to the grade levels of the speech students and any areas of academic challenge they may be personally experiencing. For example, a kindergarten articulation student may be working to identify the printed letter/s associated with speech sounds he is learning to correctly voice, while in my next session a language impaired third grader is working to categorize/classify sentences as he is learning to process and respond appropriately to questions.
