Week 6

Date: 4-10-12

Arrival Time: 10:00 a.m.

Departure Time: 11:00 a.m.

Total Time This Day: 1.0 hrs

Total Time to Date: 16.0 hrs

Activities/Observations:

• The first session consisted of group instruction; both children are 4 years of age.  Both students are working on improving their articulation skills.
• The session began with a craft with making a bunny. The speech pathologist would say a phrase targeting sounds to be focused on and the child would then have to repeat the sentence that the speech pathologist had just said five times.  The speech pathologist has the child repeat the sentence this many times in order to make sure that the child knows how to say the sentence correctly using targeted sounds.  If the exercise is done correctly, then the child gets to glue a part of the bunny together.  The speech pathologist records the results by tallying the number of correct productions for each child.  Both children did quite well with this activity. 

Analysis:

• Activities
• I thought that the activity utilizing the bunny craft was a new and interesting approach to treatment, which I hadn’t seen with the previous speech pathologist, but I thought it was effective and something I would probably use myself one day. 
• As far as instructional approaches go, the students’ session in a group, but the children are working with the speech pathologist one at a time.
• I do think that the child who is not working with the speech pathologist needs something to do as they are quickly done putting their piece of the craft together and are simply sitting and waiting; this works with some children, but not all children will sit nicely, not to mention they are not gaining much from sitting. 
   
• The classroom management used was effective.
• This speech pathologist used a sticker system for classroom management.  Each child has a sticker “board” and if the child works hard during the session with the speech pathologist, then they get to put a sticker on their “board.”  Once their “board” is full they get to take it home with them. 
• In the activity that was done with the children, the speech pathologist used the craft as a reward; which is a great idea for children who love to do crafts.  She used the craft to drive students to practice correct use of sound production, and then the student would get to put a piece of the craft together as a reward. 
• Assessments
• There were a few forms of assessment used today’s sessions.  One of the main forms of assessment was observation; the speech pathologist and the speech pathologist’s para-professional would observe the student’s and their participation in the activities in addition to their ability to work on their target sounds or other goals made before the activity. 
• Another form of assessment used today was when the pathologist recorded the findings of each student’s performance and participation with other notes into a log in the student’s file. 
• The other form of assessment used today was when the speech pathologist tallied the correct production of a target sound for each student per round. 
  
  
• Reflection
• It was very interesting for me to observe today, as I was observing a new speech and language pathologist; as opposed to when I started out with the previous speech pathologist, I now had something to compare the new experience to.  I learned about new approaches that could be used for activities and materials within a treatment session with children in an early childhood center setting.  I also learned about some alternative, but also good assessment and classroom management techniques.  Now observing two speech pathologists in schools, I have learned that the pathologists often have limited space to utilize as they work with children. This pathologist as well as the last has advised me to get a wide range of experiences within speech and language pathology and through the observations I have begun to see why; there are so many different clients with variety in diagnosis’ within simply one area of speech and language pathology, such as early childhood education in schools.   
   
• NOTE:  As previously mentioned in other posts, there are no official state issued standards that are used in the schools for speech pathology curricula. .