Both Helen and I started our careers in the NHS before moving to independent practise.  It was after finishing my maternity leave, that I started to work independently as well.  Although being in charge of the money aspect was always a little worrying, the flexibility that it offers a working parent is great.  You can read more about the pros and cons here.

So if you are thinking about starting some independent work in addition to another job or are thinking about taking the plunge and doing it full time, here are some of the important points to think about.

• ASLTIP – Both Helen and I attended an ASLTIP setting up in private practise course and would thoroughly recommend this.  We would also recommend joining ASLTIP – not only will it bring you clients, but it also provides support, supervision groups and help with things like your DBS!
• Money – Set up a separate bank account for your business.  It makes it much easier to track what’s happening and keeps everything above board.  You will also need to find a way of recording your earning and expenditures.  You don’t need flashy accounting software if you don’t want it.  I record everything in an excel spreadsheet in a way that makes sense to me!  Remember to keep all your receipts.  Make sure you plan time each month to keep on top of your accounting so you don’t have a panicked week before your tax returns is due ( I have made that mistake a few times!).  I personally use an accountant as well and she is great at finding things to claim for that I wouldn’t have known about. One last tip – I make sure I keep back at least 25% of my earnings each month so I know I will have enough to cover the tax bill when it arrives.
• HMRC – When I started, you had to register for National Insurance class 2 payments with the HMRC and let them know you would be completing a tax return.  However the way you pay NI class 2 has now changed, so I’m not completely sure if you need to do this.  Check with HMRC first!  As a sole trader, I just use my name as it is easier.  However, if you want to give your business a name, you will need to register it with Companies House and check that no-one else is using it.
• Travel – The chances are, you will be spending a fair bit of each day travelling.  Firstly, try and organise your appointments sensibly so you aren’t driving from one side of your patch to the other – this can be easier said than done!  Also try and use this time constructively.  Helen and I are both avid podcast listeners!  There are some great speech therapy specific ones – read Helen’s post here.  There are also some great ones about running a business.  I also have either a book, or something in my kindle app to read for when you end up sitting outside a school for half an hour!
• Record keeping – I do still follow a number of the protocol for note writing that we had to follow in the NHS, but not all of them!  Obviously there are clinical standards we have to adhere to, but there is also much more flexibility.  You can record your notes by hand, or on a computer.  You can change your report format.  You can assess and track data in a time frame and way that suits you.
• Saying No – Don’t be afraid to say no to appointments or clients that aren’t right for you.  I found this hard at first.  However, a parent wanting to pay you and wanting the best for their child would rather you say no, I don’t have the right skills for this, than taking them on and not doing the best for the child.  We all have our specialities and areas we aren’t as confident in.
• Terms and conditions – You really should have some sort of contract/ terms and conditions that you get new clients to sign.  Many therapists have them listed on their websites so go and have a look.  I have been very lucky and never needed to chase anyone, but it can and does happen.  Be very clear about what you can and can’t offer, when and how you expect payment etc
• Website – I also recommend that you create your own website.  It doesn’t need to be anything flashy and you don’t have to pay some one to make it for you.  There are many website providers that offer sites with click and drag type set ups that are easy to use.  It has definitely got me more business having one, so do look into it.
• NHS/ Independent – Many of us start by picking up a little independent work whilst still working for the NHS.  BEFORE you do this, speak to your manager.  I had to let HR know in writing that I was doing this and there were rules.  I wasn’t allowed to see children in the county in which I worked for the NHS.  Luckily I live on county boarders so I worked for the NHS in Surrey, but could see children privately in Hampshire and Berkshire.  I also had a very discrete caseload as I worked in a language centre and only had 20 children (This was working part time not full time!).  I also knew in advance who would be starting the following September, so I could absolutely ensure there was no conflict of interest.

I’m sure there are other things as well, but these will get you started!  Good luck!

When I was a newly qualified therapist, there was so much to think about whenever I assessed a child – which assessment to use, transcribing speech correctly, asking the right questions in the case history, making the right decision about what to do next!…  But there is one aspect of doing an assessment which is really important although it’s easy to overlook it – building a rapport with the child.

However short you are on time, it’s always really important to take the time to make the child feel relaxed and at ease.  This is also probably the best possible way to ensure that the parent feels relaxed and at ease too!  Building rapport is something that it’s hard to make rules about – to an extent, you just need to be good at reading people and working out what they need.  However, here are some of the things that I find can help.

• Say hello to the child.  It’s a simple thing but it makes a big difference.  I usually greet the parent first, but then I always turn to the child, smile and say hello!  It lets them know that I’m friendly, and that I’m interested in talking to them as well as their parent.  Some kids will say hi back, others ignore me or hide behind their parent, occasionally they scowl or even scream!  But whatever the reaction, it helps me to know how to approach them next!
• Offer them a choice of toys.  When I worked in a clinic, I would usually get a range of age appropriate toys out before the appointment started and have them out on the floor for the child to choose from.  Now, I am usually arriving at someone’s house.  They may already have something out that they are playing with, which is fine.  However, very often they are very interested in my enormous therapy bag and what might be inside it!  Often, the first thing I do is to get a few things out and let them choose one that they would like to play with while I’m chatting to their parent.  Hopefully this gives the message that I’m there to have fun!
• Don’t ask too many questions, just play!  Now, this seems like a strange thing to say.  Of course I’m not going to get too far with an assessment if I’m not going to ask any questions at all!  It’s part of the territory with assessments!  However, in those first few minutes, when I’m just trying to put the child at ease, I try not too ask too many questions.  Sometimes I just play with the child, pretty much silently for a few minutes.  Other times I will comment on what we’re doing or make sounds related to what we’re playing with (animal noises etc).  Sometimes I can be louder and more animated – it really depends on the child.  With an older child, I chat a bit more, and I am more likely to ask questions, but I try to start with something they’re interested in – maybe playing a game such as Connect 4 or getting them to show me a favourite book or a magazine on their favourite topic.  One thing is for certain though, I focus on play and just getting to know them to start with, not speech! (As an added bonus, play tells me lots about speech and language too!)
• Praise.  This is true all the time with children, but it’s especially important in that initial assessment appointment.  Did the child attempt something you wanted them to attempt?  That’s huge! – praise them for trying even if it was only for a short time.  They’re much more likely to be willing to try again if they feel that their best was good enough for you.
• Bribe!  I’m not above a little bribery in assessment sessions, especially when a child is struggling to get through a formal assessment I want to complete or reluctant to attempt it!  Bubbles and stickers are my favourite bribes but this will also depend on the child.  The iPad sometimes works well.  Sometimes the child has found a game in my bag that they really want to play.  Whatever it is, knowing that they are going to get it certainly helps me to build rapport with the child!  (I find that parents are often great with bribes too to help a child to stay focussed – I work with several children who are promised a biscuit or some chocolate buttons at the end of my session!)  Don’t forget to let the child have whatever you have bribed them with though – I have made that mistake before!

What are your favourite tricks for building rapport with the children you work with?  If you are a parent, what have you seen professionals do that has worked well with your child?

What tools do you really need when you are working as a speech and language therapist? We have written before about resources, games and assessment, but what are the other go-to things we use day in and day out?  These are the bits you find out about along the way, and that I find myself having to explain to my accountant!

• Laminator.  A good quality laminator.  I hate to think how many hours I have spent feeding sheets through one!  I have been very lucky and still have my first lamintor that my in laws bought me when I qualified.  It has a few battle scars and has survived 2 house moves!  Buy the best one you can afford.  On that note, also try and buy the thicker 250micron laminating pockets – this will save you hours of re-making resources after they have been chewed and bent!
• Dice.  Now, you obviously get dice with games, but I have a range of different ones that I use for different purposes.  I have a 7-12 dice for working with older children when you want them to think of more ideas.  I have big squashy die for children that are likely to throw them off the table, so they don’t get lost.  I also have die where you can put pictures in each side.  There are lots of options!
• Stickers.  I am always on the look out for new stickers.  We all know that speech therapy doesn’t work without stickers and bubbles!  Star Wars and Frozen are still very popular at the moment.
• Pens.  I LOVE stationary, so I will happily try out new pens.  I love the friction pens that are ink, but that you can rub out.  I have them in lots of different colours. This is great for mind maps or colourful semantics work.  I have one young lady who insists I use a different coloured pen each week to make my session notes! It’s also amazing how easy it is to leave pens in different places. So make sure you have more than one!
• White boards.  I have a few of these as well.  I have ordinary wipe clean ones and also magnetic ones.  I use these for now/ next boards that you create on the spot, recording words/ ideas/ sentences so you can work on them, teaching new vocabulary – the list goes on.  Top Tip – take a photo of the work you have done with the child before you clean the board!
• Printer. This is similar to the laminator however I have been through lots of these!  I now have a business user ink deal, so you pay a little each month and they send you new ink before the cartridges run out!  Fab and much cheaper than buying them individually.  One day, when I have the room I’m going to buy an A3 printer so I can print out game boards and bigger images!
• Sat Nav. Now I spend nearly every day driving around the country side, so I find a Sat Nave invaluable.  I just have an app downloaded on my phone, but I couldn’t be without it!  Just make sure you have a charger in the car so you don’t kill your phone battery.
• Bags/ boxes.  Storage in general.  This has become more of an issue now I am self employed and not only have children’s files, but also all my resources to deal with.  I feel like I am always buying pockets and folders so I don’t loose pieces of puzzles and bits of paper!  I also have a few young children who recognise me by my big bag with an apple on! I used to have a marvel iPad cover and now have a similar bag.  You can start up some great conversations with these – either children being surprised that I can name all the characters or a few girls telling me that those are for boys!
• Game counters.  Now this is something I am forever losing!  Just the small, flat discs.  They are useful for so many games and tasks.  You can use them to mark syllables in words, or words in sentences.  To keep track of the score or as markers on a game.
• Lunch box.  This isn’t a necessity, but it is nice to have!  I always feel silly going into staff rooms with my squashed sandwich in a carrier bag!  So I now have a real, grown up lunch bag!  Although to be fair my water bottle currently has storm troopers on, so not so grown up!

What other non speech therapy things do you use all the time?

I have been to some great training courses in person over the years that I have been a speech therapist.  There is something really great about attending a course in person – you get totally immersed in the topic with no distractions, and you get to discuss the material with fellow attendees and with the person running the course.  Watch out another day for some of the best and most useful courses I have attended in person.

However, as an independent therapist especially, going on courses is expensive!  Not only do I have to pay for the course and travel to get there, but I also lose out on all the money I would otherwise have earned that day.  Still very worth attending but I can only afford to do a certain number of physical courses in a year!  However, the internet is opening up so many more possibilities, and now you don’t always have to leave your house to do a course.  This is great – you can do more training, keep up to date with evidence-based practise, but also fit it in around your life and take the course whenever suits you.  I also like the fact that you can watch bits again if you don’t understand or forget what was said.

In today’s post, I am going to share a few places I have found where you can take online training courses for speech therapists.  The first two are even free!

1.  Pearson have now run 2 SLTLearn events.  Each time they ran a week of online training courses – mostly one hour long and run by a range of different therapists from around the country.  Topics covered include working memory, AAC, SLT assessments.  You can even hear us talking about why speech therapists should use social media.  The recordings of all of these sessions are free to download online.  You have to put in your name and email address to register but then you can listen in whenever you like.
2. A group of American therapists are running a similar event this summer.  The SLP Summit looks really good – lots of talks on various different topics.  Take a look here.  This event will take place from 31st July – 4th August, and personally, I have registered and am looking forward to it!  Again, it is free to attend, and you can listen again afterwards if you can’t tune in live, which is good, since most of them will be in the evening or at night in British time!
3. Now we come on to courses you will need to pay for.  speechpathology.com is great value for money however.  You pay $99 for the year (on today’s exchange rate, that works out as £75:59) and you can watch as many of their 350+ courses as you like, any time you like.  Well worth the money.  Every course I have watched has been very good.  The biggest problem is choosing which one to watch as there are so many!
4. The last two are not courses I have taken myself yet, but they look good, so I thought I would highlight that they are there.  I am sure I will get to them one day.  Hanen will be a familiar name to most British speech therapists.  But did you know that they offer a range of webinar training courses on their website?  The topics covered are a range of topics to do with language delay, literacy and ASD.  Check them out here.
5. Finally, I came across this one the other day in a Facebook group I am on.  Thank you to whoever posted it, I can’t find it again to credit them!  There is a long list of training courses for professionals on the apraxia-kids website, covering a range of topics relating to apraxia (called developmental verbal dyspraxia or DVD in the UK).  Click here to find them.

I’m sure there are lots more online training courses for SLTs that I don’t know about.  Do comment under this post and let us know about any others you have found useful.

Also, schools and nurseries find online training options really useful too.  It means they can send people on courses without having to buy in supply teachers or bank staff.  If you work with a school or nursery who would like some online training on how to work on speech sounds, don’t forget to let them know about our course Supporting children with speech sound difficulties where we give lots of background information and then take them through the therapy process one step at a time.  There is also a Facebook group they can join and ask any questions they have as they go and we will answer them.

I didn’t think that would work!

Sometimes children are in and out of therapy within a few weeks.  However, other times, I can be seeing a child for a long time (years).  They (naturally) tend to get a bit bored and I am constantly on the look out for new games and ideas to keep the kids I work with motivated.

However, sometimes I stumble across a really simple idea that unexpectedly really captures the imagination of the child I am working with and motivates them to keep going.  Elizabeth and I have collected together some of our unexpected successes here!:-

• I was working with an 8 year old boy on speech sounds.  This particular child was very bright and articulate but had been having speech therapy to help with his clarity for a couple of years.  No matter what I did to keep him motivated he tended to find the sessions irritating at best!  One day I took a soft foam ball and a bucket to his house and got him to throw the ball into the bucket after he had said a certain number of words or sentences correctly.  We gradually moved the bucket further away to increase the challenge.  He absolutely loved this and raced enthusiastically into his next 4 speech therapy sessions which were spent playing the same game.  He especially loved it when he discovered that he was much better at it than I was!
• Elizabeth was working with an older child on phonological awareness. She tried all sorts of games to motivate her but she didn’t want to play any games.  One day she took in a white board and pen and the child loved writing the words down on the white board.  Obviously this is not something that works for all children, but some love it!  I am working with a 12-year old at the moment who is similarly engaged by writing on a white board.  We are working on vocabulary and we write the new word and different information about it in different colours.
• Now that I have a car boot full of exciting games, it is easy to forget the range of simple games you can play with just a set of word cards.  One that has worked brilliantly for several children is hide and seek.  I get the child to close their eyes, then hide 4 or 5 cards around the room for them to find.  This is a game I usually play with preschool children, but I have a few infant and even junior aged children who have loved this too.  I think it’s partly the fact that they get to have a little wander around the room in the middle of my session!  NB Top tips for this game – only let the child collect one card at a time.  Also when it is their turn to hide cards for you, try and have a sneaky peek to see where they are putting them as invariably children forget.  I still have a couple of speech sound pictures missing somewhere in the library of a school I go into!
• Another game I frequently use with preschool children is bubbles.  However, Elizabeth was telling me about a group she ran with 3 Year 6 children (age 10-11).  She happened to have her pot of bubbles out and they asked if they could blow some.  Taking turns to blow bubbles between turns kept this little group motivated for the whole session!
• I work with one girl who is very enthusiastic about all my games but struggles to focus for very long on any of them, as after 1 or 2 turns, she wants to move on to a new one.  One day I took some little pre-inked stampers with different animals on (like these).  She spent the whole session just stamping different animals onto paper, and then asked to do this the next time too.

What unexpected successes have you had?  Share them below this post to help us all!

Helen and I love finding new games.  It helps to keep the children motivated and it also means we don’t have to play pop up pirate 10 times a day! It can be tricky to find games for older children so I thought I would tell you about a few new finds.

• Wonky blocks

This is a surprisingly tricky game!  I have been using it with year 5 and 6 children.  It would also be great for secondary school children.  It has really grabbed the attention of some of my children and they have played it for the whole session.  Interestingly they were keen to know what the record was and who else had managed to stack them up!

You get 9 blocks – 3 large, 3 medium and 3 small.  The game comes with cards which you are supposed to pick to tell you which size/colour of block to put on next.  I must admit I haven’t used these as they make the game impossible!  The idea is that you stack the blocks up until the fall over.  However, its not that easy!  As the name suggests, the blocks are wonky! So you have to look at the curves and decided which way the block is most likely to stack.  So far I have had 1 child stack all 9 blocks!

I generally use this as a motivator game.  This means that before the child gets to add a block to the tower they have to complete their target.  This may be saying a sound or word, answering a question or changing a verb into the past tense – what ever you are currently working on.

I have also used this as a description game.  I encourage the children to explain why they have chosen a particular block.  The idea is that they try and verbalise their thinking.  This can also lead to discussions about cause and effect, why one block worked and another didn’t etc.

• Don’t rock the boat

This is another tricky balancing game!  The boat sits on the iceberg and the idea is that you balance as many of the penguins as you can before they all fall off.  To actually get all the penguins on, you have to think about where you put the penguins and keeping them balanced.

Again I use this as a motivator game, so you can use it to work on any target.  I have used this with slightly younger children – Year 3’s so 7/ 8 year olds and upwards.  If they are finding it really tricky or getting frustrated I give them a hint that if you put two on at time it makes it easier!

• Inferencing Pics app from Aptus

Now this is a little cheeky as we have just written a review about this fab app. You can read that post here.  I have been using this app for a few months now and am finding it really useful for targeting expressive language skills in older children (as well as inferencing skills!)

As the pictures show different situations and are designed to make you thinking about what has happened, I find they are also great for forming ‘because’ sentences and also teaching children to form questions.  You can also work on sequencing when you think about what is happening now and then what the people will need to do next.

So that is my latest selection of games!  What else do you like to use in therapy?

Last week Helen wrote about some of the funny things that can happen when you are a speech therapist.  You can read that post here.  Whilst we were discussing last week’s post we also thought about some of the other ways our job impacts us as people.

Now, I just want to make it clear that I LOVE my job.  No two days are the same and I really enjoy helping people.  You can never predict what a child is going to say which always keeps you on your toes and makes you laugh.  However there are also times when you’re stressed and finding things tricky.

• Turning off from work.  I find it hard to stop thinking about work – that report that needs writing, if I am ready for the next day’s therapy, what I am going to say in the meeting.  This is partly because I choose to pick my son up from school and then finish my work in the evening, however it is also the job.  When you are helping someone’s child it’s hard to just turn it off.  I often plan or replay conversations in my head and yes, I have woken up in the middle of the night remembering something I needed to do for a child!
• Making people feel awkward.  As Helen mentioned you often end up discussing your job when you meet new people and this is normally fine.  However, sometimes I am aware that it can make people feel uncomfortable.  I have spoken to adult who have a stammer and mentioning my job can make their speech worse as they think  I am listening or judging.
• Effort.  To truly engage with a child takes a large amount of effort.  We are listening, watching, predicting, choosing words, translating and planning – all the time.  This can get tiring, especially when you are working with 7 or 8 children a day.  This is also not including the days when you are working with younger children and running around playing chasing games or throwing balls.  Let alone the paperwork and emails.  I often worry that by the time I get home I am not putting enough effort into my family.
• Fine line between helping and interfering.  There are a number of grey areas when we are talking about our jobs or are asked opinions on children we haven’t met.  Fundamentally we all want to help, but sometimes you need to remember to pull back.
• Making me better.  The longer I do this job and the more people I meet, I hope I become more tolerant and patient.  I greatly enjoy learning new skills and love the challenge of working out how best to help a child.  Just because a particular method helped one child, doesn’t necessarily mean it will help the next.  I believe that delivering good therapy is a skill that needs to be practised and refined.

Do any of these ring true for you or are there any other ways your job impacts on your life?

In today’s blog post we’re welcoming a guest contributor, Gemma Moore.  Gemma works for the NHS in Portsmouth and is a specialist in hearing impairment.  Gemma and I have written this post together.

There are various reasons why more than one therapist may end up working with a child.  We’re not going to go into those today.  However, when it happens, it’s really important that the therapists work together, in a complementary way.  Generally, therapists want to work together!  However,  this can sometimes be challenging.  There are several reasons for this:-

• Any 2 therapists can have slightly differing opinions. This doesn’t usually mean that one is right and the other is wrong but it can make it harder if you are initially focussing on different things.  Add in the equally important opinions of the child’s parents and their school or nursery and sometimes there can just seem to be too many opinions!
• There can particularly be a difference of opinion between independent therapists and NHS therapists. This is because of a difference in what can be provided in different situations.
• The logistics of keeping in touch can be tricky. I’ve never met a speech therapist who isn’t busy and we can be challenging people to get hold of on the phone!  Email collaboration can be tricky as certain information shouldn’t be emailed due to confidentiality.  General busyness can just mean that you don’t speak to each other as often as you should.

However, the benefit of another therapist’s opinion can also be a fantastic thing.  Two heads can really sometimes be better than one and I have often learnt new things and grown in my skills and knowledge from working with another therapist.

Gemma and I have been working together with a few children for a year or so now.  The first thing to say is that we are good friends.  We trained together, shared a house for a while after we left university and now we are godparents to each others’ children!  Obviously this has really helped us with working together, as we have a level of trust in each other that is hard to replicate with a therapist you have never met.  Nevertheless, we hope that some of our experiences of working together can be helpful to others.

We’re going to talk briefly about 3 different children (all names have been changed!)

Ben

We have both worked quite closely with Ben who has quite significant speech and language needs.  We agreed with his parents to see him on alternate weeks, so that he was able to have weekly therapy.  Initially we set joint targets and then we would send brief emails after each session or two (often just a line or two) about anything the other should know about.  We spoke on the phone every few months to review the targets.

More recently, I have continued to work directly with Ben at home and Gemma has taken the lead in working with the nursery to help transfer what he has learnt out of home and into other settings.  Again, we speak every few months to update the targets and share ideas.  We share assessment results and we both attend multi-disciplinary meetings.  I think this is particularly useful, especially for a child with more complex needs, as having everyone together in the same room really helps to get a rounded view of a child in all settings and collaborate on how best to help.

Ruby

Ruby is a child that I see weekly.  Gemma sees her once a term.  Because I am the therapist who sees her most frequently I tend to take the lead in setting targets and deciding when they need to change.  Gemma calls me before she goes into school and I update her on what I have been doing and why.  Although I do liaise regularly with the school staff, they are not often able to sit in on my sessions, so Gemma always does her termly session with the TA and demonstrates strategies and activities for them to follow up on.

Daniel

Again, Daniel is a child I see weekly.  Gemma sees him once a month.  Daniel has difficulties with both speech sounds and his understanding and use of language.  Although I do target all areas, I tend to focus primarily on his speech sounds during my sessions.  Gemma tends to focus more on functional communication, such as setting up visual support strategies for nursery.  Again, we speak every few months and make sure that we agree the targets but we each take the lead in implementing different ones.

Finally here are our top tips on working together with other therapists (especially between NHS and independent therapy):_

• Be clear with parents and school staff about who is doing what and why. Then they understand the plan and know who is the best person to ask about their query.
• Explain your thought processes to the other therapist. Sometimes the first thing you see from the other therapist is a list of targets and at times you aren’t immediately sure why those things have been targeted.  Ask and then really listen to the answer.  If you feel that something else is important, explain why you think this.  Talk to parents and school staff too.
• Agree how often you will contact each other and how and put it in your diary so that it happens.
• Assuming that you have the parents’ consent, always let the other therapist know if you have completed any assessments and share the results.
• Share reports.

What are your experiences of working together with other therapists?  What tips do you have that we can all learn from?

This is a rather different post from usual today.  People often ask us to post more about running an independent speech therapy practise.  This post is about a very specific but very important thing many independent SLTs are dealing with at the moment, alongside all other businesses in the EU – GDPR.  This post contains affiliate links.

You may have heard of GDPR, as it has been on the news recently.  GDPR stands for General Data Protection Regulations and it is a new law in the EU that comes into force on 25th May governing how we collect and process personal data.  This includes information such as names, addresses, email addresses, medical information – basically all the information we collect as speech and language therapists.  So it’s important for us to know about it.

If you are like us, you have felt very out of your depth with this.  Of course we all take data protection very seriously and follow our professional guidance about note-writing, keeping data safe etc. but it is difficult to know how this fits in with GDPR.  None of us are lawyers and most of us can’t afford to hire a lawyer either!  We were even more worried about it, as owning this website brings up lots more GDPR questions, than just running an independent speech therapy practice does.

Then we found Suzanne Dibble.  She is a lawyer who is offering affordable resources to help small businesses and sole traders to navigate their way through the GDPR minefield.  She offers a fantastic free checklist which is really useful for working out what you need to do, and a pack that you can buy which gives you templates for policies etc.  It’s not listed when you read about the pack, but this also now includes a specific policy for therapists which you can use if you buy the pack and own the copyright.

Since we have found this really helpful, we thought we would share it with you all in case you find it useful too.  The links below are affiliate links which mean that if you were to decide to buy through one of these links we would get a small amount of money.  It doesn’t cost you any more.  However, we are not sharing it to make money but just because we thought others might find it handy.

You can download Suzanne’s free checklist by clicking on this link.

You can buy the pack by clicking on this link.

Obviously this is not our site and we don’t hold responsibility for any information given once you click on the links.  However, she seems to know her stuff and we found it useful so thought we would share!

Helen and I were thrilled when Sue O’Malley, Specialist Speech and Language Therapist offered to write a post about Semantic feature analysis.  It isn’t something I have used ….yet, but it looks really useful and I will be trying this soon!  You can find out more about Sue on her website www.chattertutor.co.uk.  Here is her post:-

Semantic Features Analysis for Vocabulary Development and Word Finding Difficulties

I wanted to share a technique I have been using with some of my children recently. I found it on the website Reading Rockets. A grid is used to help children explore how things are related to one another. They complete and analyse the grid which enables them to see similarities and differences between items, enhancing their vocabulary knowledge and hopefully their storage and retrieval of words.

Here is a grid I made for a child

• I chose the topic: Animals/insects/mini beasts
• I provided key vocabulary words down the left-hand column: fly, fish, butterfly, duck, wasp and parrot.
• I provided features of the topic across the top row of the chart: has a beak, goes in water, has wings, has feathers, may hurt you, has two legs and could be a pet.
• The child then placed a tick or a cross in the matrix when a vocabulary word aligned with a particular feature.

Some of the children I am working with cannot read so I have used pictures created on Lessonpix rather than written words. Once we have completed the grid e.g. “Does a fly have a beak”, “Does a fish have a beak”? etc, I have gone on to use the Headbandz game, using the same vocabulary: butterfly, duck etc to see if the children then use their knowledge to generate questions e.g. “Does it have feathers”? and “How many legs does it have”?

I have found this a useful approach as I have tailored the grids to suit the gaps in different children’s knowledge. For example, on this occasion I realised that the child did not know the words ‘beak’ or ‘feathers’.

The Reading Rockets website provide a link where you can download blank grids and here are more useful links here for Lessonpix (which changed my life for the better!) Here is a link to the Headbandz game (but you can create custom made Headbandz cards on Lessonpix too).

I hope you find this approach as useful as I have.

Sue O’Malley: Specialist Speech and Language Therapist- Bury Lancashire