Speech Spot

This year, speech/language services for Mrs. Peterson's students are provided by Dr. Becker. In addition to pull out services, Dr. Becker goes into the classroom and provides collaborative lessons that focus on social language, phonemic awareness, and vocabulary development. By working together, Mrs. Peterson. and Dr. Becker work on improving communication skills in each student to build foundational language for reading, writing, math, science, and social studies.

This year, we will provide weekly updates on happenings in the speech/language via Mrs. Peterson's newsletter. For those students receiving direct speech/language services, homework will focus on vocabulary building and auditory/oral comprehension using the stories from the Making Meaning Program: https://www.collaborativeclassroom.org/programs/making-meaning/

Social Language lessons will mostly come from the concepts within the Social Thinking Program by Michelle Garcia Winner: https://www.socialthinking.com/ as well as the Zones of Regulation https://zonesofregulation.com/index.html. The Zones of Regulation Program works on increasing self-awareness and emotional regulation. Social Thinking lessons will emphasize cognitive flexibility and how it relates to functioning successfully in a group.

Our phonemic awareness lessons are a joint effort in which we integrate proper articulation of speech sounds using the Lindamood Phonemic Sequences Mouth Picture Cards (LiPS) with Fundations lessons. The multisensory process of learning how our lips, tongues, and mouths produce each speech sound while simultaneously learning about sounds for reading and spelling has been shown to improve reading ability in young children.

We are looking forward to a fantastic year and please do not hesitate to reach out to Dr. Becker at rbecker@htps.us should you have any questions!