Struggling to break down critical thinking skills to help your speech and language students succeed?
Are you trying to find a better way to work on higher level thinking skills with your speech students? Are you trying to bring in more academic vocabulary and skills into your therapy rooms? Are you struggling to see carryover? Are your students not seeing the relevance of what you are working on in speech? By working on critical thinking skills, you WILL be targeting what they are working on in the classrooms. You WILL help them see they can be successful. You WILL see motivation and you WILL see carryover.
What can qualify as critical thinking skills?
Anything that involving thinking deeper about the material. It doesn't necessarily have to be about a reading comprehension passage. You can start with pictures! You can work on inferencing, predicting, cause/effect, compare/contrast, and drawing conclusions.
But if teachers are working on it, why should we?
We can work on the LANGUAGE of higher level thinking. The vocabulary of the questions/responses, the language of thinking about your thinking, and even the sentence structure of how to respond. Our students need to understand syntax to understand if the question is asking about the past, present, or future. If our students don't understand multiple meaning words, they can be totally tripped up when one is used in these types of activities. Starting to see the relevance?
Why visual aids?
Our students benefit from a multi sensory approach. They need to see, feel, and touch the information. They need repetition. The more they are exposed and in a variety of ways, the more they will understand and use independently. I like to break it down so they can see the various ways questions can be asked and various ways answers can be given. They can't be so scripted that they only are familiar with one type of question/answer vocabulary.
Feeling lucky?
Are you feeling lucky?! I am giving you samples of my visual aids which are part of a VARIETY of TpT products FOR FREE!!!! Click the button below to grab it for yourself!! All you need to do is enter in your email and it will be sent to you for free! If you use these visuals, please tag me on Instagram @speechtimefun!
