Speech with Lisa

Here is some great info for parents of preschool children who are wondering if their child is stuttering and what to do about it... Check it: www.stutteringhelp.org, then click on 'Parents of Preschoolers.' I ABSOLUTELY love this website. You can also find speech language pathologists who specialize in fluency at www.asha.org, the website of the American Speech Language Hearing Association. Thanks to all the great fluency practitioners out there!!!!

I just took an amazing class from the lovely and talented Kristin Chmela regarding her recently released product, "Focus on Fluency." Let me tell you, I'm excited to check it out some more. It's a comprehensive toolkit for working with school-aged children who stutter, and it includes contract cards, home practice ideas, and generalization tools for working in the classroom. It also includes fun games for making stuttering more easy and understandable. Thanks Kristin!!! You are one of my favorite fluency practitioners ever. Kristin works with some of the very best fluency researchers out there, and she's passionate about what she does. I remember working with her at ASHA a few years back, and it was seriously one of the most uplifting, inspiring, and rejuvenating experiences of my professional life. God bless you.

http://stuttertalk.com/2009/02/25/JohnStossel.aspx

I saw 'The Miracle Worker' on Broadway yesterday, and Yes! It was incredible. Yes! Go see it if you can, or at least see the film version or your local theatrical production. Or read the play by William Gibson. There was so much richness there... class struggles, family struggles, giving service, searching for meaning, dealing with loss, losing pride, finding love. I absolutely loved this show and highly recommend it for children and adults of almost any age. May God bless the creative people who brought it into existence.

Acting Lessons for Kids With Asperger Syndrome: Scripts, Prompts, and Visuals Improve AS Students’ Social Skills

I'm on vacation and I've had some time to thinking about my lesson planning. My partner, L, thinks I should develop a really cool lesson re: vocabulary for 1st graders who have autism with the following words: President, honest, cabin, nation, Civil War, elected. I've also been collaborating with our Occupational Therapist and am thinking of throwing in a cute song with some fingerplay into the mix. Thoughts? Ideas?

It seems like many of my kids' IEP goals have to do with vocabulary and learning new lexical items. I love vocabulary! I love learning new lexical items! I'm kind of a nerd that way. When I was in college I used to keep a notebook where I wrote down new words I encountered in my pleasure reading and their definitions. Then I would study it in between classes when I had nothing else to do. It was delicious to me. There was nothing I loved more than experiencing a juicy word and taking it in, making it part of my lexicon and sharing it with the world on an overflowing plate.