Quick & Easy Back to School Tips {Guest Blogger}

Hey everyone! I hope you had a great Wednesday at work today. Today I am the guest blogger at Allison's Speech Peeps. Head on over to her blog and read my three tips for Back to School! I've included  a link to freebies from my TPT curriculum store to keep you motivated this school year!

Tamara Anderson

Building Successful Lives

BSL Speech & Language

Back to School Baseline Data

Hey everyone. I know that many school based speech-language pathologists have already returned to work and many will start back soon. Tomorrow will be the beginning of my 4th week back at work and 3rd week for students. After the initial excitement and sleepiness of going back to school and work has worn of, speech-language pathologists need to make sure that they take baseline data on their students' IEP objectives. For many kids there will be some variability in their scores from the end of the school year to their beginning of the school year data. However, with a quick re-teaching of the skill they are back to where they were previously. 

Some of you may be thinking, so what really is baseline data? This is the data, percentages, or measurable information that you collect to informally assess specific skills outlined in a child's IEP objectives. ASHA's Evidence Based Practice Glossary states that baseline is "a benchmark, measurement, or calculation used as a basis for comparison." 

Many SLPs consider the first data point gathered on a skill an accurate measure for baseline while I have heard others say that they consider 3 data points as baseline data. I have created several quick informal assessment and/or progress monitoring tools that will make it easy for you to gather this data. Just click here to access these digital downloads to help simplify your SLP life.  

I have assessment tools for oral story retell, basic concepts, vocabulary (Tier I semantic processing- object function, similarities, differences, etc), associations, wh questions, irregular plurals, irregular past tense verbs, speech fluency, speech intelligibility, synonyms, antonyms, multiple meaning words, and English/Language Arts Tier III curriculum vocabulary.  I have personally used these tools frequently in my speech language sessions with students on my caseload. 

I suggest making several copies of the forms that you need to record baseline data and keep them in a binder. I typically select the forms that I need for each student and place them in my daily student therapy files. Using informal assessments/progress monitoring forms have truly improved my ability to quantify the skills of my speech-language students. This also helps as I record progress check data throughout the school year.  

I hope you have a great school year! Make sure you subscribe to 
my blog: Building Successful Lives by entering your email in the right hand column above. This way you will get my blog articles sent directly to your inbox. I look forward to you reading what I have to share :)

Tamara Anderson

Speech-Language Curriculum Assessments

I am absolutely thrilled about my newest product, Speech-Language Curriculum Assessments that is available in my TPT store!!! It is designed for use by speech-language pathologists who support teaching the language underpinnings of the 3rd grade English/Language Arts Common Core State Standards. Other grade levels will be available in the future. 

                                         

I provide educationally relevant speech-language therapy frequently and this product is a great way to assess students knowledge of the language underpinnings of the Common Core Standards related to skills that SLPs instruct. This is a must have if you work as a school based SLP. SLPs have the clinical skills needed to provide direct vocabulary instruction that will improve students' ability to learn the standards. Here are some examples of terms assessed in red below.

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This product contains 13 curriculum assessments that are informal standards based evaluation tools in a cloze sentence format with a word bank.  They can be used to collect baseline or pre-assessment data and for post-assessments after the vocabulary words are taught in speech-language therapy sessions. 

The assessments provided will evaluate students' understanding of the vocabulary skills that are needed to master 3rd grade standards. As a bonus, I have also included English/Language Arts vocabulary assessments according to categories such as types of nouns, types of sentences, parts of speech, story vocabulary, types of literature, types of writing, figurative language, and prefixes.

I hope that this product will assist you in providing educationally relevant speech-language therapy services!  

This product pairs well with my language interventions Guess What? Curriculum Bundle and English/Language Arts Common Core Vocabulary Bundle. 

Thanks for reading my Building Successful Lives blog today. Make sure that you subscribe by entering your email in the box in the right hand column of this page. Stay connected and remember that SLPs are building speech, language, academic, and social skills of kids everyday! Keep up the great work! :) I'm back to work full-time tomorrow. Summer break is officially over. 

Tamara Anderson