I have three 5th graders who are working on refining social skills. Luckily, it works out that I can put them all in the same group so they can practice together. Occasionally, I bring in grade-level peers to participate in the role play and conversational exchanges.
When my students walk into the therapy room, I have my computer open waiting on them, and three students sit down at my horseshoe table. They know when they sit down for therapy to open up their devices and get them ready to use. We talk about their weekends and I have already assigned each of them target goals through lesson planning for their varying IEP needs. Because of the robust library of therapy materials, I can easily locate the targets necessary for each individual student without searching for physical materials or data collection materials.
I assign each student their current learning path. With this group, I like to take a blended approach of working on learning paths and then also interacting to utilize those skills or provide conversational opportunities for all of the students.
- Three students sit at my table
- All are working on pragmatics, participate in gen ed classes and some resource room
- Learning paths are set
As a group, we start with “A day at school – Caption this!” All three students get a chance to respond and fill in the speech bubbles. They all have to come up with different expressions that make sense in the context of the picture…. We go through all five targets and return to the learning path. For some sessions, I like to have them all in the same activity because then we can talk about it as a group and ultimately act it out in role-play among our group. After getting skilled at these particular scenarios, then I invite a peer model into role play with them.
- A day at school caption this
- Each student creates a unique response
- Practice role-play among a group
- Bring grade level peer to role play with
