WH Questions: Ask and Answer

This year, I am so, so, so lucky to continue to work with the ASD programs in our building.  I cannot express how much I enjoy working with this population.  Maybe it's the brilliant colleagues with whom I am able to collaborate.  Maybe it's the innocence and honesty of the students.  Maybe it's the way they always keep me on my toes.  Maybe it's the metacognitive process in which I constantly find myself.  Whatever it is, I am truly lucky.  In 11 years of being an SLP, I have never enjoyed a group of students so much.  Ok, enough.  I think you more than get the point!

One of the groups with whom I spend a considerable amount of time are the students who are more pragmatically challenged.   This particular group of students fit into Michelle Garcia Winner's Social Thinking-Social Communication Profile as Challenged Social Communicators (CSC),and Significantly Challenged Social Communicators (SCSC).  Students who fall into the CSC group typically have difficulty attending in unstructured social situations but attend better in more structured social settings.  Students who fall in the SCSC group are often distracted, focusing on their thoughts and unaware of social demands.   In these two groups of students, autism is very visible; it's not subtle.  

During most sessions, I start our social skills session sitting in a circle as a group.  Students practice  formulating grammatically correct questions to show an interest in each other,  improve their language skills by asking and answering the questions, listening for responses, and practice using adequate eye-contact, while keeping in mind that these skills look different for each student.  I find that I am always scrambling to find questions to ask at the last minute, which is why I created this WH Questions: Ask and Answer pack.  It started out with just the ask and answer cards, but eventually became bigger than what I anticipated because I realized I could use it with more students than just in the social skills classes.

The first set of this activity pack includes eight receptive WH question prompts and eight expressive WH question prompts for each of the following; WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE, WHY, and HOW.    In essence, it includes 96 WH question cards.  The second activity includes 20 stimulus pictures with at least one WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE, WHY and HOW question for each picture.  The third activity includes 10 picture prompts to which students formulate one question for each of the WH question starters.  

This activity pack also works well for students working on articulation carry-over, making inferences, and problem solving.  We hope you find it helpful for you and your students!  You can check it out at our TpT store!

Why Review Parts of Speech?

The parts of speech can be boring, in fact a middle school student I see for private therapy (who does not really like giving up his summer swimming or baseball time) recently asked me, "Why do I need to know about the adverbs and pronouns stuff?" I don't love teaching it, but I have good reason. My answer to him was that he would need to know these parts of speech when he was writing, when he was taking state tests or if he wanted to learn another language (helping him to categorize the new words). I also like to incorporate this into therapy so that my older students understand how organize their sentences and correct their writing. I do a review of the parts of speech with 5th-8th graders primarily as they have already learned about most of the parts in their language arts classes. I don't cover all the parts of speech but like to review nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs.

1.) I start my review with this Poem:

2. Grammar Jammars App: 

We talk about each part and if they need more scaffolding I then review each part with an app called Grammar Jammers that is free put out by Pearson. They have two editions one for primary grades and one for later grades. It has cute and catchy videos like this one:

3.) Activities to Review

To make parts of speech more fun I have students create their own GrammarJammer Video or Flip book to remember the parts that are hard to remember (many times its adverbs). While we read a book together in therapy or when we are learning vocabulary we talk about the parts of speech and when I have students write a sentence.

I am interested to hear if you also find it functional to teach the Parts of Speech ? Why or Why Not??  

Thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts. 

New Spring Language Activities!

We have posted a new spring language bundle on our TpT store!  The price has been reduced until Tuesday, April 8th at 9:00 pm.  The activities are available for individual purchase as well, and ALL activities are aligned to the Common Core.  Spring Language Learning