Why SLPs Should Use Sticky Note Tabs

Are you looking for more ways to help your speech and language students comprehend a text?

Give my students a paragraph…they can grasp it.  They can tell you who it was about, whathappened to them, and answer basic comprehension questions about it.  Add more paragraphs to it and they cannotseem to be able to do the same tasks! Does this sound familiar? 

Many shut down and don’t even want to read a text that ismultiple paragraphs.  Whether they likeit or not, they have to read a longer text and comprehend it in their academicclassrooms.  We can help them by teachingthem strategies to assist them.  It isour role as SLPs to provide scaffolding and strategies to help our studentsaccess the curriculum.  This also helpsus see carryover into the classroom. When our students realize they can be successful with what we teachthem, they are more likely to try it on their own.

That is why I like to teach my students to use sticky notetabs (you can buy them as tabs or just cut sticky notes into strips).  I like to teach my students to read eachparagraph separately.   Self-monitor comprehension by being able to express a main idea of that paragraph (who orwhat was it about and what happened to it/what did they do).  After reading each paragraph and expressing the main idea..write it on a tab and place it right next to the paragraph.  No multiple pages being flipped back andforth for writing on a graphic organizer (don’t get me wrong love me a good graphic organizer but I love not having the paper flipping).

Once the student reads the entire text they will have multiple tabs which can help them:

• Summarize the text
• Locate evidence or where in the story the answer might be without having to reread the entire text, only that paragraph
• Sequence events in order
• Tell the main idea of the entire text
• Recognize which paragraph they might have struggled to comprehend

What can we do to help them?

• Model how to formulate and write the main ideas
• Model how to use the tabs to generate a summary or locate answers to questions

Want a bonus idea?

You can even take the tabs OFF of the paper and rearrange them. 

Have students put them back intoorder to retell the story in the correct sequence.  (Story below taken from readworks.org).

So easy right? I know you will love this strategy and your students will benefit from it too!