SLI Intervention Activities

Anyone else feel like it's a Friday?? Sad part is it's only Tuesday. I don't know why, but I'm already worn out!

Anyway, school started up again for us, which means lots and lots of reading of articles! We're starting out with SLI, and I found some great ideas that I thought I would share with you all. These ideas are from Leonard (2000). I'll put the full reference at the bottom in case you would like it.

In this chapter of the book, Leonard talks a lot about different assessments that were done. However, I thought these could be modified into good tasks for therapy.  Check them out:

1) A communication game where the children describe toys to a blindfolded puppet-Show the kids 3 objects. These objects will vary in properties (color, size, shape). The SLP will point to 2 of the 3 objects, and the student will describe those objects to the puppet. The puppet should be able to pick out the objects.

2) Children are asked to describe 1 of 8 pictures to an adult who isn't looking. Then, the adult will locate the object based on the description. These pictures should have binary variables. The example given in the text was a picture of a boy riding a red bike with little wheels versus a girl riding a red bike with little wheels versus a boy riding a red bike with big wheels, and so on.

3) Haptic recognition task-Have shapes and then pictures to make the shapes. Children wear blindfolds and feel geometric shapes. Then, they identify the picture that depicts the shape they felt.

4) Variation of #4-Keep the child blindfolded after they felt one of the shapes. Then place another shape in their hands. Ask them whether or not the shape matched the one they felt earlier. To make this harder, you could hand them a series of shapes and ask if they match the original.

5) Tell them which objects to select from an array-Children with SLI have trouble with attributes, so ask them to take two that are the same color or the same shape. You can do this for any attribute-size, shape, color, etc.

6) Variation of #5-Increase the complexity of the sentences and ask them to point to 2 different objects. The example in the article was "Point to the large white circle and the small green rectangle."

 I think it's nice to not always have to purchase objects and just use what you have! Most of these things are pretty standard or are easily adaptable, so I hope you can use some of these in therapy!! Let me know what you think!

Leonard, L. B. (2000). SLI as a limitation in general processing capacity. in Children with Specific Language Impairment (pp. 237-268). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.