Are your students prepared to join the workforce when they leave speech? As SLP’s, we are always thinking of tools and strategies that students can use when they are in the real world outside of the speech classroom.
One of the most important things we can do is help prepare students with the skills they need to find jobs and learn to be independent. This means teaching them how to communicate with others, teaching them simple tasks that will help them get hired, and taking them out in the world so that they can get practice interacting with others independently.
In today’s episode of SLP Coffee Talk, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Maureen Howard from Spoonful of SPED to talk about how we can work together with special education teachers to give our students the technical and communication skills they need when they graduate out of speech therapy in school.
Maureen is a High School special education department chair dedicated to supporting teachers, families, and students to be successful in high school and beyond!
In This Episode You’ll Discover:
- The challenges of working with super seniors
- Strategies to improve communication and device usage issues
- How SLPs can make speech time more relevant for high school students
- Games you can incorporate to engage older students
- Tips for taking students out in the world for job preparedness activities
- Common sites to take your students to in the community
- Tasks you can assign students in the classroom to learn job skills
I hope this episode gave you lots of ideas for speech goals and different activities you can do to role play in the classroom and help your students gain the skills they need to find jobs when it is time. There are so many ways you can incorporate these themes into your speech closet in a relevant way.
Maureen has so much experience with high school students, so make sure to connect with her on social media to hear more of her best tips for working on these skills with our older students in a way that is relevant and interesting to them.
If you are looking for more activities that you can do with your high school speech therapy students to teach them those valuable life skills, check out my Life Skills Bundle here!
Joke of the Week:
Q: What did one toilet say to the other toilet?
A: You look flushed.
Resources Mentioned:
Visit Spoonful of Sped on Teachers Pay Teachers
Check out my Life Skills Bundle
Where We Can Connect:
Listen on Your Favorite Podcast Platform
Follow & Review on Apple Podcasts
Are you following the podcast? If you’re not, I want to encourage you to follow today so you don’t miss any future episodes! I already have so many amazing guests and topics lined up, I would hate for you to miss a single one! Click here to follow on Apple Podcasts.
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