Please welcome my guest blogger, Linda!
Hide and Seek: Bathroom
Did
you ever have a principal ask you to have your speech office in a bathroom? An
IN USE boy’s bathroom??? Seriously!! This actually happened to me when entering
an overcrowded city school with a principal who disliked the previous speech
therapist. Obviously, I said “No, thank you.” and found my own work space in
the building.
While having your office in the
bathroom is about as far from ideal as you can get, SLPs working with preschoolers will end up
spending some time there. Fortunately, there are lots of functional words and
phrases that can be modeled and elicited while in the bathroom.
Early in the school year, the
bathroom is great for working on
following directions with spatial concepts, such as in, out, on, off, under,
up, down, here and there.
Action words can be taught in
functional phrases. These include: open the door, help me, pull down/up, take
off, put on, zip/ unzip my pants, sit down, get up, get toilet paper, wipe
yourself, flush the toilet, turn the water on/off, wash your hands, dry your
hands, put it in the garbage, etc.
While you will be modeling and
teaching bathroom vocabulary receptively or for following directions at the
beginning of the year, don’t stop there! It is so important to get students
using the basic communicative functions expressively, too, such as requesting
(help me), commenting (all done, uh-oh!) and describing (cold
water).
As SLPs, we tend to jump in quickly
and start talking, so it is important to remind yourself to use the expectant
pause after routines have been established and the basic vocabulary is
understood. You know what comes next in the routine, he understands! Now is the
time to wait for your student to ask for help or comment! It’s okay if she can
go through the routine independently and quietly. That is your cue that your
student may be ready to have conversations about what you were doing before the
bathroom break!
For nonverbal students or those
with ASD, don’t
forget to work on joint attention and expressive communication skills, too!
Name the item needed and wait for her to look at it before helping. Wait for
him to look at you and then what he needs help with to make a request. Start
adapting your environment with visual symbols, like ‘I need help.’ Use hand over hand exchanging to get
requesting started, if needed.
Speech therapy in the bathroom?
Absolutely! As long as it isn’t
your office, too!
To
enter the Hide and Seek Blog Hop raffle, collect the names of the participating
blogs and where they are hiding and enter them here.
