Teletherapy: Do a book study!

I spent 12 years as a literacy coach. Yes, I am an SLP. Believe me, I received some smug puzzled looks from teachers when I bounced into their classrooms as their coach for the year. My favorite reaction from a classroom teacher was always, “You’re just an SLP. How are you going to coach me?” Being an adept actress. I would often look at them apologetically and say, “I know. I am just an SLP. But I noticed your kids in line for lunch. Wow, you have some needy ones. I can definitely help you with your struggling students.” The needs of the kids became our common bond. I actually loved coaching. No IEP’s. No paperwork. No report cards. Just kids. Kids and lessons that promoted access to the curriculum for all students, but most especially the students who were having difficulty. I privately cried a lot my first couple of years as a coach, wondering what the heck I had done to myself. But during that intense decade, I fell in love with using books as tools for learning. I fell in love with revealing to children the writer inside themselves and that their words were powerful and important. Heady stuff. Seeing the learning candle lit was addictive. And so often it was a book, a piece of art, an illustration, or a poem that served as the catalyst. Since returning to speech therapy, and embarking on this journey in telepractice, I felt that pull to bring books into my therapy sessions in a meaningful way. I now use a document camera to read aloud with students while sharing the printed text. One of the books I am using this year with some of my middle and high school students is Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli. The chapters are short and packed with figurative language and great sentences, perfect for analysis and inferential thinking. I created a playlist in YouTube with videos of teachers reading chapters aloud and collected favorite quotes from the book on Goodreads. When I read aloud with students, I write my thinking on sticky notes and use these notes to model questioning, inferring, and synthesizing.  Another book I am using with some upper elementary and middle school students is The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo. I created a playlist in YouTube with video of the author and illustrator talking about the characters and clips from theatrical productions based on the book.  This text also contains short chapters, rich language, and engaging characters. 

Sticky note on text from The Miraculous Journey of
Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo using a document camera.

Teletherapy: Office Design Part 1

I moved this month. The last time I moved, sixteen years ago, my son was in kindergarten and my daughter was in 5th grade. I was much younger then. One purpose of the move was to downsize.  Downsizing is supposed to mean getting rid of stuff and locating to a smaller house. My husband and I accomplished moving to a smaller house but failed at the getting rid of stuff part. We now have a basement that looks like a furniture consignment shop. Hopefully our kids will take most of it as they continue to pursue independence. Hopefully. Or not. I'll worry about that later. One of the best benefits of this move has been living close to my aging parents. My dad will be 89 this summer! I've already been able to pop by their house before heading to Kroger and they stop by with cookies and herbs and tomatoes from their garden and homemade wine. Nothing like the taste of a home grown tomato. And the wine. Sipping a glass of Malbec right now. Moving back to the town I grew up in was a foggy dream a few years ago. Now, as I click on my keyboard watching my office curtains billow in the breeze, I smile, maybe even get choked up feeling like I don't deserve what I have. Speaking of my office--I love my office. My office. Mine. Since retiring after 30 years of working as an SLP in brick-and-mortar schools, I work from home as a teletherapist. Did I mention that I love my office?

Fly swatter adds a nice touch, don't you think?

I transformed my old dining room table, plus two leaves, into my amazing desk. I have room for two monitors and ample space to use my document camera to share books and activities. I keep my printer on a cart that rolls under the table. I also have room to stow my paper shredder. The area behind the desk has short book shelves and filing cabinets. I wanted to keep the space that students would see behind my face while on the webcam as clear as possible. The window provides wonderful natural light.

Teletherapy: Using a Document Camera Part 3

In Using a Document Camera Part 1, the focus was on how to incorporate a document camera to share materials, typically used in face-to-face therapy, for telepractice sessions. In Using a Document Camera Part 2, the emphasis was on ways to use books to engage students. In Part 3 of this series, incorporating books is a continued theme.  Do any of your students have goals related to producing grammatically correct compound or complex sentences to describe characters and events, respond to questions, or compose questions? Using a document camera to engage the student in a virtual book pass is a low cost high-yield activity with the potential to address all of these goals and more. In brick and mortar schools, a book pass in a classroom might look like stacks or tubs of books placed among the students. The student can choose books from the tub, look them over, then decide if they want to add it to their "Books I Want to Read" list. After a few minutes the book is passed on to another student to examine. The most effective book passes I have participated in are followed with a class discussion about what books the kids found the most interesting and exciting or having the students share their lists and explain why they added particular books. 

Teletherapy: Using a Document Camera Part 2

Books. Books. More books. I love books—all kinds of books and when I started using a document camera to share my favorites, a huge weight was lifted from my nervous telepractionershoulders. Once again, I had the ability to share a book, using my voice, stopping when I thought it made sense, and thinking aloud to facilitate comprehension strategies in response to the child. And here is the amazing part, I had the ability to zoom in and zoom out on parts of illustrations, words, and sentences. That power to show parts while hiding others is a useful tool for facilitating inferential thinking, questioning, and synthesizing. Bring on the delicious wordless picture books! The wordless book used in the video clip below is The Red Book by Barbara Lehman.

Teletherapy: Using a Document Camera--Part 1

Thank you to Chelsea DiMarzio, one of my managers, for
encouraging me to try a document camera and giving me
new ideas for planning telepractice therapy sessions. 

Are you new to or considering using teletherapy to provide speech therapy services? Are you using a platform like Go To Meeting? If so, seriously consider purchasing a document camera. For me, it has been worth every penny. Before purchasing my Ipevo Ziggy HD Plus, I asked what other speech therapists were using on the Teletherapy Materials for Speech-Language Pathologists Facebook group. I searched for and purchased my document camera on Amazon and it arrived in less than a week. I followed the directions for downloading the software, played with it for about an hour, and was ready to use it for therapy the next day.