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!)

Students are regularly asked to use text evidence to support their answers in their regular ed classrooms. As SLPs, we can support this learning and practice in speech therapy. I describe some of my favorite expressing evidence therapy ideas in this post!

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.

For this activity, it required students to come up with the three examples of the main idea. It was very easy to see from the story what they were. The hardest part, recording the “detail” that went with the example. So, we used our evidence! I created an impromptu visual with my Post It. I gave my students a sentence strip to complete: “In paragraph _____, the author stated that ______.” This really helped them!! They were so successful knowing this outline of how to complete this. We practiced first just saying it and then they got to write it down to practice that way since that is how they are expected to answer it in class. We then practiced other ways to express evidence:

-“The author stated that…”

-“The text says…”

-“The author proves this by….”

I saw so many light bulbs go on with my students. It is great to teach them a skill they will be able to use in their classrooms and to easily make that classroom connection. These reading folders come in all the necessary skills we target as well: sequencing, cause/effect, inferencing, and more. You can check them out by clicking HERE.

You can view some text evidence sentence starter visuals freebies by clicking HERE, HERE, or HERE!

Check out my text evidence print and go worksheets on TpT as well. It is a great way to practice!

Students can have fun by using props, highlighter, or fun gel pens to locate the evidence! Anything that is different from the norm is fun, easy to prep, and will get the job done!