Friday, December 10, 2010

This week in Speech

Speech and language students at Prairieview have been practicing using contextal clues to interpret the meaning of unfamiliar words while reading. They have made progress thinking of "What makes sense in the sentence?" when predicting meanings. Most of the students are feeling more comfortable attempting to figure out possibilities rather than skipping the word or giving up.

Other children have enjoyed listening to reading passages or watching a brief video and summarizing the story. They have used summary guide graphic organizers to identify characters, setting, and sequence of events. They are improving story-telling and expressive language skills.

Lakeview students enjoyed writing on Mrs. DeYoung's "Word Wall"
to list various character traits and synonym and antonym pairs. They generated lots of adjectives to describe emotions and personal attributes. This activity is helping to increase vocabulary and develop comprehension and reasoning skills.

Thursday, December 2, 2010

Lakeview Speech and Language Groups

This week Speech/Language students at Lakeview have been finishing up extended response activities. The children read an article about high school students in Oakland, California who work at a coffee cafe to earn high school credit and useful business skills. The student employees raised money for a local youth project while earning a salary. Our Jr. High students were asked to write an essay on "Should high school students be allowed to participate in a work program rather than go to school?" The young writers had to use evidence from the article to support their opinion. They practiced citing facts from the text and interpreting them to draw conclusions. The students used graphic organizers to outline
their ideas and explain cause-effect relationships. Many of them were challenged to extend their thinking to explain how working at a job may or may not provide a valuable educational experience. In the process they were encouraged to recognize an author's point of view and elaborate on ideas. They often needed assistance thinking of words to describe character traits of student employees. Many of the students used laptops to type and edit their essays. These skills will continue to be addressed in language group in the coming weeks.