Many students, especially grades 3-6, have goals that focus on describing, categorizing, and comparing and contrasting. These goals can be tricky to teach and require a lot of background knowledge and skills, so some tips for teaching these skills within speech therapy sessions are listed below.
To get started, check out our last blog post for three tips to get started, and this blog post will build on that.
Consider Teaching Multiple Items within a Category
Focus on teaching multiple items within one category (i.e. ocean animals, vegetables, school supplies). This can help students learn how items within a category are similar and different (i.e. these two ocean animals swim, but these two ocean animals can crawl). This can also give students an opportunity to learn new vocabulary and understand more about the items you are describing.
Use a Word Bank of Descriptive Words to Reference
Often times, students are expected to describe items without really having the descriptive vocabulary they need to describe such items. What are the parts of the item? What is the item made of? Using the ocean animals example, you may want to go over some vocabulary such as: flippers, fins, scales, shells; and create a word bank so students can reference these words.
Repetition and Expansion is Your Friend
Give this process time and repetition. It can be easy to think that after a few lessons, your students should be able to describe novel (untrained examples) items and categorize them, but that just isn’t the way it works. Take time to teach several categories and items, and then work on adding to the items in that category. Eventually you can try categorizing items and naming items in categories that are novel.
I hope these two articles were helpful as you continue to teach these common IEP objectives. If you’d like a done-for-you activity that already includes all these tips and suggestions, check out this bundle in our store.
