Are your speech students required to use evidence when answering comprehension questions in the classroom?

This tends to be a common theme around my school.  Students are required to demonstrate how they developed their responses.  Yes, we are SLPs not ELA or reading teachers but we still can help target this skill in the therapy room.

I call it…expressing evidence!

Let's take out the reading and writing and it can be fun and a great way to work on this skill (and teachers will be super grateful!)

What is the biggest challenge, teaching your students how to express it in a complete sentence.  My students tend to know the vocabulary word “evidence” since they hear it often in their classrooms.  They also HATE looking back into a text to find their answers.  So, I find motivating texts that are below their reading levels to help them.

I got these reading file folder activities from Lakeshore Learning.  These are great for reading activities to target a specific skill.  They come with a graphic organizer that you can write on with a dry erase marker or photocopy.  I don't give the graphic organizer until after we read the story together.  Before we read, we preview the title and the images.  Students get to predict what they think the story will be about.  I write down their predictions on my dry erase board.  This turns this “boring” activity into a bit of a competition.  Then, we read the story together one paragraph at a time.  After each paragraph, my students have to tell me in a word or phrase the main idea or what the author its trying to tell us.  Then, they had to tell me how it was related to the title.  Once the story was completed, I handed out the graphic organizer.  At this point, the students already recognized a common theme since we kept referring to the title as we read each paragraph.  They also got to easily see how the title can help them with the main idea.

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