Welcome back, friends! The holiday season is upon us! As we decorate our homes and turn up the tunes, let's wrap up our discussion of using qualities to help our children and students describe and better understand new vocabulary. Today we will first discuss: Location As with categories, function, appearance, composition, and parts, describing where something belongs helps our children and … Continue reading Expanding Language: Location

Hello again! We reconvene our discussion about the use of hands-on activities to target our students' understanding of the "qualities" of vocabulary words in order to enhance and expand their language skills. Today, we focus on the quality: Parts Many objects have identifiable parts. Recognizing and identifying these parts helps our children and students not only better … Continue reading Expanding Language: Parts

Hello friends! I apologize for my absence. Microsoft Word crashed on my computer, so I was trapped in material-creation limbo. But now we're back in action! Per our plan, we are continuing with our Expanding Language activities series. Remember, the 7 qualities we are exploring include: Category Function Appearance Composition Parts Location "Anything Else" So … Continue reading Expanding Language: Composition

Welcome back! Last time we met, we discussed the importance of helping our students/clients/children better understand objects' functions by acting them out. Today we will delve into our next descriptive quality: Appearances This one seems simple enough. When you ask a child to describe what something looks like, they can see a picture of the object … Continue reading Expanding Language: Appearances

Continuing with our theme of expanding language understanding and use by exploring the various qualities of target vocabulary and ideas, today I give you a new activity exploring the quality: Functions This activity will help your students/clients/children to explore the various functions of the provided objects, or, in other words what the objects do. Let's return to our … Continue reading Expanding Language: Functions

Hello, friends! As promised, I've created an activity for you to target the first Expanding Expressions quality: Categories As a speech therapist, I often had my students describe words and ideas using the qualities I mentioned in the last post: category, function, appearance, composition, parts, location, and "what else." In doing so, they were able to … Continue reading Expanding Language: Category Sorter

Calling all moms, dads, speech therapists, and teachers alike! I'd like to share one of the most dynamic tools I learned about in my speech pathology master's program. The technical name for the program is the Expanding Expressions Tool. Figure 1 Essentially EET (Expanding Expressions Tool) uses tactile/visual cueing to help students and speech therapy … Continue reading Expanding Expressions – Language Therapy

The central purpose for this website is to share speech therapy ideas, knowledge, research, and inspiration. I have decided, however, that I would also like to share on my other passions in life, namely: faith, family, and real-estate. A recent discovery of mine encompases all three of these: Lifeonaire. Picture from: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00R9R3Q2G/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 One of the … Continue reading Extra Edition: Lifeonaire

Welcome! As we are all new here, why don't we start by introducing ourselves. I'm Ashley. Brand-spanking new mom, wife, daughter of God, speech-language pathologist, and real estate investor. I'm starting this site for a few reasons, the foremost of which being that I miss my practice. I've always known that I wanted to be … Continue reading In the Beginning . . .