Literacy-based Intervention: Step-by-Step

Successfully Use Storybooks to Reduce Planning Time, Easily Work in Groups, and Target Multiple Communication and Academic Goals More than anything, we can’t tell you how much fun literacy-based intervention will be for you and the students you work with.  Enjoyable and Research-based?  Not possible you say!  Well grab a cup of tea, have a seat, and lean in.  We are about to tell you a story about how speech-pathologists are waking back up to the reasons they joined the field in the first place. Here is the process:

• Watch the lesson videos below.
• Each lesson has a video accompanied by handouts and related materials to be used for therapy, which can be downloaded from the material tab.
• Lessons can be taken in any order. But there is a logical order to the course.  We start with the research and fun cultural pieces and then work are way through pre-, during-, and post-storybook activities.
• At the end of all the lessons you will take a short quiz.

Introduction to Literacy Based Intervention

You have probably used fiction and non-fiction books throughout your career. In creating this course, we tackled research in speech-language pathology, education, and library science to assure that every minute of contact has a tremendous impact. This course is organized into 9 sections that will give you the all the buy-in, background, activity ideas, and materials you need to produce powerful literacy-based intervention.

Why Use Storybooks in Speech and Language Therapy?

You are smart and probably have a lot of letters behind your name and years of experience to prove it. You need facts and proof before you buy in to a new philosophy. We are researchers as well as practitioners and know that there is a huge gap between what goes on in academic research and what gets tested out in the schools and clinics. It is no one’s fault. It is hard to do research when you have a caseload. And at the university, it is hard to find professionals and campuses to participate in a study. While this is true, it is not an excuse. In the first section, we highlight some important research to show why literacy-based intervention is a good use of our time.

Improving Story Narratives of Children from Different Cultures

How do we decide if narrative difficulties are due to an impairment, second-language influence, or cultural difference? This section highlights how culture and language shape the way children recount events and tell stories. By understanding differences in narrative styles, we can more successfully assess why a child is not producing or recalling stories as we would expect.

Language Sampling to Accurately Assess What to Work On

This section gives us the tools to know exactly what to work on and the means to strategically tie our therapy to communication goals and requirements of the curriculum. We will walk step-by-step through a child’s story to see what is present and what is missing. We show how to write concrete, measurable goals and introduce you to an online goal bank where the work has already been done for you in Spanish and English. We then provide specific curriculum-aligned objectives (e.g. Common Core, TEKS in Texas) related to literacy-based intervention and tips for how to collect data along the way!

Choosing Goals and Taking Data

In this section we provide dozens of templates with examples of how they can be implemented in your therapy today. All activities found in this book are designed to be:

• Easily reproducible
• Used individually or in groups
• Applicable to almost any book
• Used on a variety of goals simultaneously
• Built around communication objectives and aligned to the curriculum

Storybook Intervention

It is important that we take a moment and explain really how simplistic this is. Those of us who are successful with literacy-based intervention, those of us that boost academic productivity, are not doing something other-worldly. Quite the opposite. We have copies of a small number of highly-impactful templates that can be used with any book.

Pre-Reading Activities

Many professionals do a really good job while the book is open. But we are burning through therapy materials and not serving students with limited book experience well if we are not using these simple pre-reading strategies.

Reading Activities – While the Book is Open

This is why you thought you joined this course! Did you know there was so much more? Now we dive into the precise ways to interact with the story so that we can stretch it across multiple sessions and get to the heart of a child’s goals.

Post Reading Activities – After the Book is Closed

After the book is closed? We’re done right? You have just given your students the ability to answer any question, tell a story to someone, or answer a question correctly in class. Revel in this experience and teach your clients or student how to be successful.