Hide and Seek: Bathroom

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!

Linda’s home base is Looks Like Language, but today she’s in the: Bathroom! 

Thank you to Kim from Activity Tailor for organizing this blog hop!

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.