SMILE Program for Early Childhood Intervention

February 29, 2008

One of the biggest challenges we encounter with the model of home-based therapy in Early Childhood Intervention programs has been a lack of follow through. Once a therapy session ends, we as therapists are relying on the parents to become the service provider. The problem has been a lack of structured materials and programs to guide the parents. They have had little information and nothing tangible to help them along in the process. We knew we needed to embed activities with specific goals into the routine of the families and give them a simple, concrete road map to be successfully involved in development process.

After months of development and work in the field, we are excited to announce the release of our SMILE program, a bilingual, home-based intervention plan for the speech-language pathologist and early childhood interventionist. SMILE is an acronym for Sign, Model, Imitate, Label, and Expand, five strategies we encourage families to use on a regular basis to increase their children’s communication skills.

Ellen Stubbe Kester, Ph.D., CCC-SLP
President - Bilinguistics

Ellen discusses what SMILE is:

We developed SMILE with the goal of enabling parents to be more engaged in the developmental process and we are extremely excited about the results we are having. The tools are really encouraging the families to use the program and stay involved. The parents immediately have an understanding of their role and a picture of where we are going, and the results we are shooting for in the end. The program is available at our home page bilinguistics.com

Posted by Bilinguistics Team | Filed Under Early Childhood Intervention Speech, SMILE | 1 Comment 

Bilingual Speech Therapists Can Be an Island

February 20, 2008

At Bilinguistics, we work with Spanish speaking children almost exclusively. Having said that however, bilingual speech pathologists make up only 3% of the field with the rest being monolingual English. We’re on this bilingual island but have important information that monolingual English-speaking therapists need. Many of the Spanish- speaking SLP’s in Central Texas Districts know about us, but we also need to speak as much or more to the monolingual community. They can truly benefit from our expertise and the resources we’ve created to address the needs of this fast growing segment.

We’re kind-of lulled into a sense of security here in Central Texas where we are getting good at handling the bilingual speech needs of children. However, as you move further away from Central Texas, many districts are having problems properly identifying and supporting the needs of bilingual children. Many school districts don’t have bilingual therapists on staff and deal with evaluations by bringing in a translator to work with an English-speaking therapist. While this can be successful, it can also prove very challenging for the therapist and many times the child. If it’s not done right the result can be Spanish- speaking kids who are not impaired ending up in special education classes. We’ve also seen the other extreme of a child who was profoundly deaf placed in a general education classroom because they just assumed she didn’t speak English and couldn’t understand. These are the types of complexities we deal with everyday.

There are huge issues in smaller communities that don’t have easy access to workshops or other resources that will help address bilingual populations. We realized our team could take a much more active role in helping to engage all SLP’s, whether bilingual or monolingual in the best ways to deal with the bilingual speech needs of children. At Bilinguistics we’ve built a great, experienced team and some fantastic tools to work with English Language Learners. We realized we can serve the monolingual English speech therapists through an online web community. Our online CEU’s have been focused in this area for some time but now we are creating this blog & interactive community for the monolingual and bilingual speech pathologists.

We encourage you to share your experiences and problems in these areas. We invite you to ask questions and want to hear your stories.

You can post comments on our blog below or send us an email by clicking here and submitting your questions and ideas to our team. Also, please forward this on to others that you think would benefit from being involved in the conversation.

Posted by Bilinguistics Team | Filed Under Bilingual Speech Pathologists | 2 Comments 

Good Bilingual Story Books

February 6, 2008

Hey Everyone,

      Here is a list of bilingual books that have good translations and work really, really well with many speech and language goals.  All of these also work well with the literacy-based intervention paper here: http://bilinguistics.com/education/abad_0712/index.php

 

Regards,

Scott

Level English Title Spanish Title Author/Illustrator
Preschool through Kindergarten:  Bear on a Bike Oso en bicicleta Stella BlackstoneDebbie Harter
  The Cow that sad OINK La vaca que decía OINK Bernard Most
  The Grouchy Lady Bug La mariquita malhumorada Eric Carle
  Brown Bear, Brown Bear Oso Pardo, Oso pardoQué ves allí Eric CarleBill MartinTeresa Mlawer
  We are going on a Bear Hunt Vamos a cazar un Oso Michael RosenHelen Oxenbury
  Click Clack Moo:  Cows that Type Click Clack Moo:  Vacas Escritoras Doreen Cronin and Betsy Lewin
  Where the Wild Things Are Dónde Vivan los monstruos Maurice Sendak
  Where is Max? Dónde está Max Mary PearsonSamantha Walker
Kindergarten through 2nd grade Bear on a Bike Oso en bicicleta Stella BlackstoneDebbie Harter
  Where is Max? Dónde está Max Mary PearsonSamantha Walker
  Where the Wild Things Are Dónde Vivan los monstruos Maurice Sendak
  The Giant Turnip El nabo gigante Aleksei Tolstoy and Niamh Sharkey

Goldilocks and the Three Bears

Ricitos de Oro y los tres osos Eng: Caralyn Buehner and Mark BuehnerSpan:  Valeri Gorbachev
  The Cow that sad OINK La vaca que decía OINK Bernard Most
  It Could Have Been Words Podría haber sido peor A. H. Benjamin and Tim Warnes
  Tell Me a Cuento Cuéntame un story Joe Hayes
  Click Clack Moo:  Cows that Type Click Clack Moo:  Vacas Escritoras Doreen Cronin and Betsy Lewin
  Walter the Farting Dog Walter el perror pedorrero William Kotzwinkle, Glenn Murray, and Audrey Colman
2nd through 5th The Giant Turnip El nabo gigante Aleksei Tolstoy and Niamh Sharkey
 

Goldilocks and the Three Bears

Ricitos de Oro y los tres osos Eng: Caralyn Buehner and Mark BuehnerSpan:  Valeri Gorbachev
  Walter the Farting Dog Walter el perror pedorrero William Kotzwinkle, Glenn Murray, and Audrey Colman

  

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