How to Make a Speech Therapy Checklist for School
Many things can be done to assist an individual who struggles with speech. Before a course of treatment can be administered to remedy a deficiency in speech, it is important to gather information about the individual and their speech disability. This will help you create an effective and appropriate treatment plan. Before you delve into finding solutions, be sure you have identified the specific problem. Create a speech therapy checklist to help you organize your observations.
Instructions
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Generate a list of categories in which a speech deficiency may cause a student to struggle. To identify a speech disorder and determine the impact that this disorder is having on an individual student, you will need to divide up the different areas of language functioning and gauge the student's ability in each area. Create a list consisting of the major language function areas including listening comprehension, reading, oral expression, and interpersonal skills.
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Select observable elements that you can use to measure listening comprehension. Create a list of questions that can be answered yes or no. These questions should be observable behaviors. That means you should not include things such as, "Does the student understand verbal instructions?" It is not possible to observe whether or not a student actually understands something. Instead, gauge understanding by observing the student's actions. List questions that you can answer like, "Does the student follow verbal directions?" Come up with at least ten, age-appropriate, observable behaviors that can indicate whether or not a student is processing information given to them verbally.
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Create a checklist to measure the student's reading skills. List questions regarding reading skills characteristic of the student's age group. If you are trying to measure a 1st grader's reading skills, you could ask, "Can the child identify 1st grade sight words?" If the child is not impacted by a speech and/or language disorder, he should be on par with his peers, so the performance of peers is a reasonable measure to assess the student against. Be sure to include at least 10 reading skills that are age-appropriate.
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Populate the oral expression section of the checklist with questions regarding the child's verbal abilities. Consider at what level the child should be functioning verbally and create a list of ten questions using these characteristic speech skills. Questions like, "Does the child speak in grammatically correct sentences?" and "Does the child properly pronounce grade level appropriate words?" will be easy for you to answer and will help you determine if the child is performing at the level of his peers in the area of oral expression.
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Generate a list of questions regarding the child's behavior. Students with severe speech disorders are frequently withdrawn from peers. Determine if the child you are observing experiences this separation by creating a list of at least 10 age-appropriate, peer interaction related questions. If you are dealing with young children, questions like "Does the child share well with others?" will do nicely. If you are trying to observe an older child, consider questions such as, "Does the child sit with peers at lunch?"
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After you have created the checklist, give the list to an objective third party and ask them to complete it. Since you created the list, the results would likely be skewed if you filled it out yourself. Ask a teacher in another subject or a tutor who works with the child to complete the list. This will also help you double-check your observations and make sure that everyone associated with the child is seeing the same behaviors.
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Quantify the results. After the checklist is completed, add up the no responses in each section. No responses represent areas in which the child does not perform at the same level as his peers. If the child has five or more no responses in a particular section, that may be indicative of a deficiency in that area. If the checklist seems to indicate an area of weakness, refer the child for testing so his disability can be identified and accommodated for.
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