Achieving Speech & Language Targets

A Resource for Individual Education Planning

Achieving Speech & Language Targets is a practical resource book for Special Needs Coordinators (SENCOs), teachers, teaching assistants and speech & language therapists who are working with children who have significant language delay and who are in their first year at school. Checklists provide professionals with a shared reference from which both broad special needs areas and specific speech and language targets can be identified. The authors emphasise the crucial role of play in language development and the book offers more than 200 games and activities to help children achieve their targets for each stage using a simple, structured layout.

The book offers:

· Advice on how to draw up effective Individual Education Plans (IEPs).

· Checklists which enable the user to identify a child’s problems in the areas of: understanding language; using spoken language; and developing speech sounds.

· A wide range of games, songs and rhymes to help children achieve specific targets.

· Teaching ideas & targets, key vocabulary lists, and activity areas for each stage.

· A resources section containing photocopiable activity sheets; games & rhymes; a booklist; techniques used by speech & language therapists to encourage understanding and use of language; and a dictionary of terms that refer to speech & language.

This is an essential tool for busy teaching staff. Many of the activities can take place in the context of the everyday curriculum and include a range of play opportunities designed to make learning interesting and dynamic. Almost all activities can be carried out using equipment that is readily available in early years’ classrooms.

Contents
Introduction; How to use this book; Activities for understanding language; Activities for using language; Discriminating, making and using speech sounds; Resources.

Readership
Speech & language therapists and students, teachers, SENCOs, educational psychologists and teaching assistants.

About the authors

Jill Spring is a speech & language therapist specialising in child speech and language disorder. She has worked in a variety of paediatric settings including community clinics, assessment centres, opportunity playgroups and mainstream schools. She is currently Senior Clinician in a speech and language base providing an outreach service to pupils with severe speech and language impairment.

Catherine Delamain is a paediatric speech & language therapist with 41 years’ experience. She has worked and collaborated closely with nursery, special and mainstream schoolteachers. She is now delivering a rolling programme of training for mainstream teachers in Key Stage 1 enhancing teacher ability to meet the needs of children with speech and language impairment.