 Wow, it has actually been almost two months since I last posted. My apologies! As everyone knows, it has been a busy time navigating the new "normal" of living and working during a pandemic. It has been quite a learning curve, at first figuring out tele-therapy and now all of the new safety measures as we begin to slowly reopen for in-person sessions. Luckily for me, one of the other SLPs at Grow wrote this blog post that summed up our thoughts on the matter quite nicely! We have been fortunate to be able to use the self-regulation and "flexible thinking" tools we so often teach to our kids as we go through this transition time of learning so many new things! So, without further ado, I'll let Ashley take it away: As for so many people and businesses during this uncertain time, things have not been running “business as usual” for Grow over the last few months. Amanda, Catherine, and I have been doing our best to adapt, and learn new skills in order to be better prepared to support our clients and families during this era of social distancing. We are so fortunate to be working together as a team (Zoom team-building, anyone?), and consider ourselves blessed to be able to work with all of our amazing clients and their families right now! Therapy has looked different over the last few months (zoom, vooks, boom cards, oh my!), but the underlying goal of connecting with our clients in meaningful, and growth-centred ways has remained the same. No matter the platform, helping our clients reach their potential has always been our top priority.Being apart from our clients only reinforced for us how important human connection is, and that though we weren't able to be together in-person with all of our clients for some time, we found new and creative ways to connect in other means. As we SLPs like to say, it's physical distancing, but we can still maintain social closeness! I wanted to take some time to share what I have learned with you. Here’s a look at a few of the new activities we discovered during the era of teletherapy (for more online resources, check out Amanda's blog post here):
 Here’s a look at a session I put together targeting three-word utterances with a child, while we were on a pirate ship  And another behind the scenes shot of an ice-cream shop story that all three of us have been using over the last few months As we hope you can see, teletherapy (though admittedly daunting and scary at first) has been a new and exciting change for us. It has allowed us to expand the repertoire of activities in our toolbox while continuing to develop our skill-set as child-centered therapists. The shift to teletherapy has been an adventure into flexible and forward thinking, which is something I often teach my clients but have learned I needed a reminder of as well. It hasn’t always been easy, because sometimes technology doesn't work how I want it to, but it has been such a great growth opportunity for me! This experience has showed us at Grow that we are much stronger, and more resilient than we once thought, and that anything is possible when we work together. We hope you at home have been able to see the silver linings during this uncertain time as well. *** If your child is seeing one of us for teletherapy, you may be wondering how much longer until we can get together at the clinic for in-person sessions now that restrictions are being lifted across BC. We are thrilled to announce our clinic is reopened, and we are now seeing some patients for in-person appointments again! As per our College’s guidelines, we are still continuing teletherapy for many families if it is working and we feel goals are still being met. But, if teletherapy hasn’t been a viable option or is becoming difficult, we are now able to bring some families into the clinic. However, things may look differently than they did before! We have put some new policies in place to ensure everyone remains as safe as possible. Some of these policies include:
We are so happy to take everything we learned during the time of teletherapy, and continue to apply it in our sessions with our clients. If you have any questions about the resources you read in this post, or would like more information on our Covid-19 health and safety measures, please contact Amanda directly. And, as always, happy talking!
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 You don't have to know me well to know that I love to read. And it's hard for me not to bring that into my sessions with kids! I use books for most of my lessons, either as a jumping off point, the main focus, or related activity. Since one of the best ways to pass the time at home right now is reading, I thought I'd put up a list of some of my favourite books. But I have So. Many. So I'm hoping to do a few lists. Today I'll be listing some of my favorite books to work on social thinking - whether it be problem solving, perspective taking, compromise, identifying emotions, etc. There are some great books that are created specifically for Social Thinking curriculums (like these), but I love using story books in addition to a more curriculum focused book. Really, almost any book can be used for social thinking in some way, but here are some of my favourites (in no particular order except roughly younger to older readers):  Horse Meets Dog by Elliott Kalan and Tim Miller This is a delightfully hilarious story about a dog and a horse meeting for the first time. Dog things the horse is a huge, oddly shaped dog. Horse thinks the dog is some delusional, tiny baby horse. They can't figure out why the other doesn't like the same things they like. This book is short, full of laughs, and also a great one for discussing perspective taking and compromise!  The Monster Next-door by David Soman This is a very cutely illustrated book about a boy and a monster who become friends...until one of them plays their music too loud! Then, all bets are off. The boy starts listing off all the things the monster did to slight him (really and imagined) and ends up in a broiling rage. However, after finding himself in the monster's house, he realizes that maybe he was a bit too harsh. This is a great book for looking at perspective taking, friendship, and emotional regulation.  Giraffes Can't Dance by Giles Andreae and Guy Parker-Rees This is a lovely book about overcoming preconceived notions about what you're capable of! If your child has ever said "I can't..." then this is the book for you. (It's available on Vooks free right now too!) Giraffe thinks he can't dance, so he is humiliated at the annual jungle dance...that is until a helpful friend gives him some support. Sometimes all you need to succeed is to be flexible and think about things in a different way!  Z is for Moose by Kelly Bingham One of my favourite books for targeting emotions. Poor Moose his having trouble waiting his turn in the alphabet, so he tries to take Duck's turn and gets in trouble. When he finally (finally! waiting is so hard!) gets to M, he finds out that his turn was given to someone else. He hits the red zone immediately and scares the owl and smashes a pie and knocks over a queen! However, he's able to calm down by the end and gets the reward he deserves.  Unicorn and Horse by David Miles Another one available on Vooks right now. This is a great book about friendship, as well as dealing with feelings of jealousy. Sometimes it's hard to take another's perspective if we think they're too perfect!  Rosie Revere, Engineer by Andrea Beaty This is a great book for talking about perseverance. This book celebrates failures as a part of the process. Often the kids I work with see their difficulties as failures, so when we read this book, we talk about how we can incorporate all of the parts of who we are into ourselves and keep on trying! You can see astronauts on the ISS reading this book here!  Narwhal and Jelly by Ben Clanton These books are a hilarious account of two unlikely friends. The stories revolve around a jellyfish and narwhal who are best friends. But just because they're friends doesn't mean they don't have their arguments! This is a great book for looking at themes of friendship, social problem solving, being flexible, perspective taking, and using your imagination. This book is great for reluctant readers.  Ape and Armadillo Take Over the World by James Sturm Another cute comic book about two unlikely friends, this one delves much more into the conflicts that can arise during a play date. We can see what happens when one player wants to dominate all of the play (and also the world). It makes the other player have some big feelings. But don't worry! The book has a happy ending with ice cream!  Bird and Squirrel by James Burks Yet another story of two unlikely friends and all of the bumps in their friendship. These books are hilarious and pretty easy reads for reluctant readers. I also find them great for targeting expected/unexpected behaviours (bird is almost always doing something unexpected!), perspective taking, and flexible thinking. I'm curious to hear some of your favorite books! This is just a sampling of mine, and I love to expand my library regularly, so feel free to comment with some recommendations!
Happy Reading!  Well, this month has been interesting, hasn't it? I'm sure you're reading this from home because, let's be honest, we're all stuck at home these days. It has definitely been interesting trying to keep my kids (aged 4 and 7) busy while also trying to get some work done. Fortunately, I was mostly scheduled to be off on Spring Break this week, so not too much has changed in our daily routine. Yet. :) I'm sure most of you are going through the same things! So, to help you guys out with the new challenges of entertaining kids without all of our usual activities, I decided to write a post that includes some of my favourite online resources. Stay tuned for another post all about my favourite stay-at-home (or otherwise social-distancing) fun activities.  If only working from home with kids were always so...color-coordinated! First off, I want to add a little caveat. As a parent, language development expert, lover of all things kids and play, I have to say: It is okay for your child to be bored. I'm going to say it again for the people in the back. It is okay for your kid to be bored! Bored is not a bad word. From boredom comes the fire of creativity. Okay, maybe that's a bit much, but certainly boredom helps our children develop certain important skills like problem solving, emotional regulation, executive functioning, play skills, social skills (especially if your bored kid has an equally bored sibling!), and - yes - creativity. So, if your child is whining about being bored, maybe wait a smidge longer than usual before handing them some entertainment or suggestions. More often than not, after about the 5th (or 500th? Eesh) time they ask you to entertain them, they will go off and find something to do themselves.  BUT, that's not always the case. Sometimes they don't. And sometimes, we as parents just don't have it in us to wait through all the whining. And that's why I'm here to help! Here are a couple online sites (mostly learning-related) that you can give your child when they really need some downtime or screen time.
I wish you all the best in these trying times! Stay tuned for an upcoming post about my favourite do-at-home activities for keeping kids busy and learning. Feel free to comment with other favourite online resources below. Thanks for reading! Amanda As I mentioned a few posts ago, Grow has grown! Our two new clinicians have been getting familiarized with the clinic and our clients and have been having a great time engaging in fun therapy sessions over the past month. Please meet our second new clinician, Catherine, who has come all the way from England! Due to the recertification process, she is currently only working as an SLP assistant, though she is certified as a Speech Therapist in the UK. We're hoping her Canadian recertification process should be finished in the summer. For more about Catherine, read on!  Where did you go to school and how long have you been practicing?
I studied at Leeds Beckett University in the UK and graduated in 2013. I worked as an SLP in the UK for 5 and a half years. Since moving to Canada in July 2019, I have been working as a remedial teacher for students with language-based learning disabilities and am thrilled to now also be working with Amanda. What made you decide to become an SLP? I have an older brother with Down Syndrome. My family used a form of sign language called Makaton to help him to communicate before he started speaking verbally when he was around 5 years old. He also has a severe stutter, but due to a shortage of SLPs, he was unable to receive ongoing support for his language skills and his stutter. This inspired me to become an SLP so that more people can be supported with their speech, language and communication skills. What is your favorite thing to work on in therapy? Social Skills! I love helping children to work on their social communication skills so that they find it easier to navigate the idiosyncrasies of the social world they are living in. It's lovely to watch the children I work with to feel more at ease with understanding both their own and other people's body language, thoughts and emotions. What is your favorite thing about being an SLP? I can't decide between 2 favourites! 1) The moments when the children I work with begin to notice their progress and surprise themselves with their newly developed skills. The pride they feel and their growth in confidence makes the job so rewarding. 2) The amount I learn from children whom I work with. They open my eyes to new ways of thinking, providing different perspectives and helping me to continue growing both as a person and as a professional. What is an area you'd like to learn more about? For a long time I have been interested to learn more about how and why certain difficulties with cognition, language and social-emotional skills sometimes tend to occur together. One day I would love to research learning disabilities in greater depth to understand the different areas of the brain that affect these areas of development. What do you like to do when you aren't helping kids improve their communication skills? Vancouver is a prime spot for exploring the great outdoors! It is also a prime spot for rain. On sunny days I love to spend time exploring this wonderful city and hiking through the beautiful nature that surrounds it. On rainy days I can be found with my head in a book, sipping herbal tea and eating chocolate. We have exciting news over at Grow! Two new clinicians have come on board this month and are ready to bring the fun in speech and language learning. Currently they're only on Fridays, but they'll be expanding in the future. So if you're looking for an SLP, now is the time! For the first time in awhile, Grow doesn't have a waitlist. So, without further ado, let's meet our first new SLP on the staff, Ashley Debrouwere!  Where did you go to school and how long have you been practicing?
I received my undergraduate degree from the University of Manitoba in linguistics and psychology. From there, I went on to complete my Master of Science Degree in Speech Language Pathology from Minnesota State University Moorhead. I have been practicing for about four years now, and have been enjoying every minute of it! After graduating, I worked for a private practice in North Dakota, and then moved back home to Winnipeg to work in the public sector at a hospital, serving mostly preschool aged clients. Now that I have moved to Vancouver, I am working both in a school, and part-time with Grow. What made you decide to become an SLP? I always knew I wanted a career where I would be able to help people, and also allow me to pursue my passion of language, and communication. I have always been fascinated with how language allows us to connect with each other in such a meaningful, and profound way. Both my parents worked in the medical field, and knowing me as well as they do, encouraged me to spend time shadowing some of the SLPs at the hospital where they worked. I quickly discovered speech-language pathology was the perfect fit for me. What is your favorite thing to work on in therapy? I really enjoy working with preschool aged children, targeting social emotional development, and early language skills. I love seeing how a child’s mind works, and exploring new skills with them as they learn, and we practice together. I find working with families very rewarding, so providing parent education and counseling is another part of working with this population I really enjoy. What is your fovorite thing about being an SLP? The best thing about my job is that I get to help children be their best selves! I find it extremely rewarding to be able to work with a child and his/her family, build strong relationships with them, and help them reach their goals. There is nothing better than watching a child make positive steps towards his/her goals, and feeling so proud of them for everything they have accomplished. What is an area you'd like to learn more about? I would love to learn more about literacy, and reading therapy for children. This is a skill that many children struggle with, and one that I am only just starting to gain experience in. What do you like to do when you aren't helping kids improve their communication skills? I just recently moved to Vancouver from the prairies, and I am having so much fun exploring all that the city has to offer. New hiking trails, restaurants, festivals - I even went downhill skiing for the first time recently, and had a blast! Other activities I enjoy include learning new languages, and exercising my “creativity muscles”. I have been studying both Spanish, and ASL for the last few years back home in Winnipeg, and would really like to get back into that here in Vancouver. I enjoy expressing myself through creative outlets, so I spend my free downtime journaling, knitting, or trying new recipes from cookbooks. (You might have noticed that the title of this post has changed from "Activity" of the week to "Book" of the week. This is because I noticed that I'm most often posting about one book and many accompanying activities. So, each week I'll post my literacy-based activities under "book" of the week.   This week is all about Valentines Day! I've been using this cute little book for lots of my younger kids this week. I like it because it has great pictures with a lot of action, but few words. That way I can get the kids to make more inferences and think a little bit more about what's happening in the story. This story is about a family of mice that make and deliver Valentines to all of their neighbours. Like all of the other books I do, this one lends itself to lots of different levelled activities. My kids who are just learning how to put words together can practice describing the pictures: "He is falling," for example. For kids using more complex language, I use this book for inferencing questions as I mentioned above. It also lends itself well to a few vocabulary words, such as "deliver," "anxious," and "relieved."  The mouse is UNDER the slide  There are so many great activities that can accompany this book. For one kiddo learning location prepositions, we played a hide and find game. I mentioned there were lots of good opportunities for inferencing and predicting in this book because of the limited words. Some questions I might ask are:
You can see, there are a lot of questions about feelings here! Valentines Day is also a time when I focus on feelings with my kids. The Story Grammar Marker from MindWing Concepts uses a heart shaped icon to indicate feelings in a story, so it gels in nicely with Valentines Day. We start in the context of the book, discussing how the family feels when they're delivering Valentines, when they realized one of the mice is lost, and when they find him again. Then we do an art project thinking about all of their own feelings. This is a great jumping off point for the Zones of Regulation as well. In the art project below, we just used pink hearts, but you could easily use hearts to correspond to the Zones.  This book can also be used for some articulation practice. There are quite a few consonant clusters to target, such as "sl," "gl," "fl," and more.
Stay tuned for next week (or the week after that, let's be honest!) where I share the next selection of book-related activities. Thank you for reading and happy speaking! Amanda Well, it turns out it did take me over a week to get out our next Activity of the Week. It has been a busy time at Grow, as we are GROWing! Two new clinicians have been hired this week, so stay tuned for some "Meet the SLP" entries to get to know the new team members better.  But, finally and without further delay, here is this week's Activity of the Week. To continue on our snow theme, even though all the snow has been long rained away here in Vancouver, we read Snowmen at Night last week. This is a great book for discussing perspective taking and expected/unexpected behaviour in a fun and silly way. With some of my preschool and early elementary kiddos this week, we did the following extension activities with it:
 I did read this with a few older kids as well and used it as a jumping off point to make a bio poem. After reading that bio poems ("bio" as in biography) can be a good way to increase perspective taking skills in middle schoolers, I've started to incorporate this into some of our narrative language sessions. We first make bio poems about ourselves and then we work through the template with characters in the books we read. Typically I do this with more serious characters, but this week, we made a bio poem about silly snowmen! :)
Stay tuned for the next Activity of the Week! Thanks for reading, Amanda Welcome to the new blog! The delay in uploading a "first post" was primarily due to me trying to figure out who and what this blog was for. Is it for you, parents, deciding whether to see an SLP or looking for ideas of what to work on at home with your child? Is it for you, fellow SLPs looking for new therapy ideas and evidence-based practice? Is it for those interested in pursuing a future career as a speech pathologist? Or is it a mix of all three and maybe a few I haven't even considered? In the end, I decided it's most likely going to be the latter, because I think I can provide content for all 3 of those options. I'm going to try to make it easy to navigate by using the "categories" links located in the right-hand sidebar. There you'll be able to click on whichever category suits you best and find all the posts specifically tailored to you.  Me with my 2 daughters For this first post, I'm going to provide some more information about myself as a bit of an introduction. If you're a parent considering hiring a private speech-language pathologist, you definitely want to make sure you're hiring someone whose expertise and temperament is compatible with your child and their needs. To help in that process, I've answered a few interview questions below, so you can get a better idea of who I am and how I work.
Where did you go to school and how long have you been practicing? I graduated from the UBC School of Audiology and Speech Sciences in 2007. After that, I worked in the public sector for awhile at the Surrey Centre for Child Development. I also consulted to an amazing private SLP who used to work in the Vancouver area. I have been practicing privately on my own since 2009. What made you decide to become a speech pathologist? I studied psychology (with a minor in Spanish) in my undergrad at Boston University. At that time, my degree advisor was Jean Berko Gleason, a massive name in the field of Developmental Psychology and Language Development. When I realized that my favourite part of psychology was learning about how children developed language, Dr. Gleason advised me to look into becoming a speech pathologist. What is your favourite thing to work on in therapy? Though I do do speech sound therapy in my practice, my *favorite* things to work on are higher level language skills - anything from forming sentences all the way up to social skills and pragmatic language. I love working on narrative language, reading comprehension, and discourse. I often think this is because my undergraduate degree is in psychology instead of linguistics. What do you love most about being a speech pathologist? So many things!!! I love that I get to read books and play games as part of my job. I love that I get to find the fun in all of the goals I target. I love seeing the look on the kids' faces when they achieved a goal or gave the correct answer and they know it! I love working with families and supporting real, functional communication in the daily lives of the kids I work with. What is an area of the field that you would like to learn more about? I'm really interested in learning more about the building blocks of literacy and how it is so intertwined with oral language development. One of my professional development goals for 2020 is to learn more about literacy development. Another is to really continue to increase and hone my skills when targeting social competencies. What do you like to do when you aren't helping kids improve their communication skills? I have two daughters (pictured above), so I spend a lot of time with them. We love playing Uno and creating elaborate pretend games. I also am a writer so am always trying to carve out time to work on my manuscripts. When not writing, I love being outdoors, hiking, swimming, camping, all of the above! Stay tuned to see more posts! I'll be adding a "therapy activity of the week" documenting one activity I did each week. In addition, I'll post lots of info about books and activities I use frequently. I'll have some posts coming up about typical and atypical speech and language development, as well as some red flags for when you might want to seek an SLP. Stay tuned for all of that and more! One quick note, to anyone hoping to become a loyal follower of my blog, my posts might not be as frequent as on other blogs you may follow. My primary priority is to provide the best service I can to my clients, so therapy time, prep time, and professional development will always take precedence over blog-writing time! That said, I will update here at least weekly with my activity of the week. :) Thank you for reading and feel free to comment! |
AuthorCarla Monteleone & Deborah Carter own and operate Grow Speech and Language Therapy in Vancouver, BC Archives
May 2023
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