ANAMAzing Ideas for Therapy! (Thanks Pixar)

While sitting in a day-long conference on school-based SLP challenges associated with qualifying kids from culturally and linguistically different backgrounds, one the the presenters mentioned using the Pixar animated short film, Partly Cloudy, as a great interactive, informal assessment or treatment tool to evaluate a child’s narrative skills, emotional recognition, inferencing skills, etc. This got me thinking that there might be other Pixar “shorts” out there that would be fantastic for use in treatment sessions. Below are some ideas about how you can use a few of these fun mini movies with your clients:

“PARTLY CLOUDY”

What your client can be working on:

• Recognizing and analyzing facial expressions (and explaining why the character might be feeling that way)
  
• Pausing the video at different points and making predictions about what will happen next (immediately next, after an hour or two, tomorrow, etc.)
• Problem solving when the character(s) feel sad/upset/disappointed
• Comparisons between happy/joyful/ecstatic/proud characters and sad/upset/disappointed/angry ones

“LUXO JR.”

What your client can be working on:

• Create a script for one or both lamp characters. This involves perspective taking, theory of mind, prediction, etc. (lots of those tough social cognition/executive functioning/social communication skills that many kiddos struggle to learn and use)
• Inferring how each lamp character feels at different points in the mini movie
• Making predictions about what will happen next (and supporting those predictions with contextual clues from the mini movie)

“DAY AND NIGHT”

What your client can be working on (this short is best for older elementary/middle/high school students):

• Create a script for one or both characters. What kinds of expressions are they likely to be using? Are these characters friends? Siblings? Strangers? How do you know?
• Categorize the differences between things that happen during the day versus at night. Work on finding an efficient way to document all of these examples without having to re-watch the short over and over (this is a critical study skill!)
• Pause the mini movie at various points and discuss how the characters feel and how you know

“THE BLUE UMBRELLA”

What your client can be working on:

• Fill in thought bubbles for each umbrella and notice and discuss the changes in what each umbrella is thinking as the short video goes on. Why do these changes in thoughts/emotions/behaviors occur?
• Make predictions about what will happen next

Media can be such a great way to engage students of all ages in working on therapy objectives. Any other animated shorts out there that folks are using?

Ideas for Social-Cognitive, EF, Pragmatic Language Therapy: Part 2

I promised a part 2, and I shan’t disappoint (shan’t…I went there!). As a continuation from my first post with ideas for social-cog, executive function, and pragmatic language therapy, this second post will keep the ideas flowing and hopefully add to your arsenal of go-to activities.

Visuals, Visuals, and More (concrete) Visuals:

I am steadily learning the importance of supporting social communication intervention with tons of visuals. When I think I’ve reached the visuals peak, I cut and laminate one…more…thing. Why? Because so many of these clients benefit from visual supports early on in their therapy. I recognize that you might be worried about setting them up to be dependent upon these visual aids later, but in my humble experience, I usually end up spinning my wheels and banging my head against the wall when I nix the visuals and overestimate how well the client will perform. Here are a couple ways to make Social Thinking concepts more concrete through…(you guessed it…) VISUALS!

Are you working on mind files or friend files? Use an actual file folder to show how these mental files can store information about others. The amazing Sean Sweeney and Pamela Ely at The Ely Center taught me this fun acronym for teaching kids what kinds of information belongs in a mind file. As you can see, I ended up changing “mind file” to “people file” since my client had such a hard time remembering that these files are about people (and not everything under the sun). However you decide to coin the term, think about using concrete visuals to support initial stages of learning!

 

The Social Detective book from the Social Thinking curriculum is a great resource for introducing kids to critical social communication skills involved in being a social detective, but I have found that creating a real (ok, ok…paper) toolkit gives kids ownership over the social communication tools they are acquiring. I let them add the eyes to their toolkit once we’ve finished our “thinking with your eyes” activity for that day. As we target more concepts (like “thinking with your ears,” “brain in the group,” etc.), they get to add those tools to their toolkit. Sometimes it can be fun to pull out the tools you need in a particular situation. Once again, the visuals are just a support for teaching these foundational skills and making sure the information is relatable and concrete. 

Expected/Unexpected By Context Game

I used this activity to probe my client’s current understanding of expected and unexpected behaviors in different school contexts, but you could very easily use this as a teaching tool as well!

 

I start by having the client choose a context/environment/setting out of a hat (e.g., “In math class”). He then has to sort a variety of behaviors (also picked from a hat) to determine whether they are expected or unexpected in that particular context. Even if you only got this far in the activity, you would have some awesome information about how well the client can determine what’s expected versus unexpected in key environments throughout his day. Once this initial sorting is done (and the subsequent discussion has occurred, if you choose to discuss their choices), you then have the client choose a different context from the hat and switch it into the original context’s place. The client must now decide if some of the behaviors that initially were sorted as expected belong in the unexpected category (and vice versa). Some different context ideas are included below:

 

Why does this skill matter? It’s not enough that clients can determine what’s expected or unexpected in a static setting. They need to recognize that expected behaviors may change depending on the context: it’s fine to run around on the playground at recess, but running becomes unexpected when you are in the middle of social studies class. This activity helps to support the cognitive and social flexibility needed to shift expectations between settings.

Thinking With Your Ears: Easy Activity to Introduce Inferencing Skills

I had to start verrrrrrrrrry basic when introducing “thinking with your eyes” and “thinking with your ears” for my current client. Specifically for “thinking with your ears,” we spent a fair amount of time just identifying the sources of sounds with a couple different sounding board apps (Touch the Sound by Innovative Mobile Apps and SoundBoard by Lux HQ Ltd.). Once he was tuned into thinking about what he heard, I moved to the activity I’m here to highlight. I laid out sets of pictures I’d printed, and the client’s job was to think with his ears to choose the picture that best matched my verbally read sentence. I started with very concrete sentences, and slowly increased the complexity to include sentences or utterances that required increasing amounts of inferencing skill. The more abstract the sentence, the more the client had to listen for contextual clues to guide accurate picture choice!

 

Examples of sentences for the pictures above:

Easy/Concrete: “The man wore a tiny hat”

More Challenging: “It was cold outside”

 

Examples of sentences for the pictures above:

Easy/Concrete: “The boy was working on his test”

More Challenging: “All his studying paid off in the end” or “I wonder what the teacher will ask”

 

Examples of sentences for the pictures above:

Easy/Concrete: “The kittens snuggled on the blanket”

More Challenging: “They looked almost identical” or “All three enjoyed being in the sunshine”

Well, that sums up part 2 of my therapy ideas for this tricky, but awesome group of clients! There are so many great resources out there, and I encourage all of you to find ways to share the cool intervention techniques you’re using!

 

 

Ideas for Social-Cognitive, EF, Pragmatic Language Therapy: Part 1

I work with a high schooler who (in honor of Thanksgiving) has a cornucopia of challenges in the social cognition, executive functioning, and pragmatic language realms. I am by no means an expert on this population, but I’ve been lucky enough to spend time interning with a few experts in this area of speech-language pathology (Pamela Ely and Sean Sweeney), and also received a scholarship to attend the Social Thinking conference in Portland, OR this past October. These experiences have given me a solid foundation for developing intervention plans for kids who fall somewhere on the spectrum of social language deficits.

Just to complicate things a bit, clients with social communication deficits rarely have isolated issues with pragmatic language. Often, they have concomitant challenges with executive functioning, cognitive flexibility, and overall impaired cognition. As such, effective intervention requires lots of adaptation and a willingness to incorporate ideas and methods from a variety of sources. I love mixing resources from Michelle Garcia Winner’s Social Thinking ® curriculum, Sarah Ward’s executive functioning curriculum, Pamela Ely’s social cognition curriculum, and Bonnie Singer’s self-talk curriculum. This 2-part blog post is all about sharing some of the ideas and visuals I’m using in my therapy with this current client, and highlighting the amazing minds who have come up with the awesome ideas underlying what I’m doing!

Probe for Perspective Taking

Although I did this as a probe to gather some baseline data about my client’s perspective-taking abilities, you could easily use this as a treatment activity to support the development of perspective-taking skills. I used sequence scenes from the following set of cards:

The reason I like this particular set is that it has sequences with 6-8 cards each (which makes the task more challenging for the client). You’ll want to pull out all the cards that relate to a single sequence and flip them over so the pictures themselves are hidden. Ask the client to choose one card and keep it hidden from you while he looks at it. First, ask him who knows what card he has (correct answer: “me”). Next, ask if you know what card he has (correct answer: “no, I’m the only one who knows what’s on the card”). Then, ask him how he could help you know what’s on the card without just showing it to you (correct answer: “I can describe it to you”). The client’s response to each question provides valuable information about their ability to take another’s perspective. Finally, have the client describe the picture to you using whatever details he chooses. Once he’s done describing the card, slide it back into the pile (still face down), shuffle all the cards, and then flip them all over so the pictures are showing.

You then try to guess which card the client had based only on the details he described. Since many of these cards have similar items (bike, boy, mom, helmet) and the client likely didn’t give enough detail to isolate a single card, you can narrow down your choices of possible cards and see if he can provide enough specific details to identify his chosen card from the others. This is a great little task for both determining a client’s current level of perspective taking and for teaching the skills associated with strong perspective taking!

Self Talk Visual

My client requires LOTS of visual support as we tread through the concepts of social cognition and pragmatic language. This is a super easy way to help him contextualize self talk as something that occurs like a thought bubble. Even though we do a lot of audible self talk right now, I’ll eventually fade that along with the visual aid. For now though, I model self talk by holding up this laminated thought bubble (yeah yeah, I know it looks like a laminated intestine…it’s not art class!) and often ask him to do the same. All you need is some card stock, a laminator, and a few straws (covered in tape) for the handle!

Sometimes, I use this same thought bubble to demonstrate when I’m having a red or green thought, and the kinds of feelings those thoughts give me. The beauty of laminating everything is that you can write on them with dry erase markers and then just wipe them clean. I stick my green or red thoughts to the velcro inside the thought bubble and specifically indicate the emotion that I’m feeling:

Conversation Roadmap

Once I taught my client how to introduce short, concise topic statements that let people ask “wondering” questions (i.e., wh- questions), I moved onto the conversation timeline. Little did he know that conversations don’t just involve one person talking for 20 minutes about the topic of their choice. This visual gave him a concrete way to recognize the basic components of a conversation, and even helped to reinforce the idea of talk time I’d previously introduced (color coding the cards made this a piece of cake). Since we were practicing conversations as a pair, I had two differently colored sets of cards. The “topic” card indicated a topic statement for the conversation, the “C” card indicated a comment, the “?” card indicated a question, and the “R” card indicated a response to a question.

Each time someone added something to the conversation, they mapped out their addition by laying down the corresponding card. This gave us a concrete way to go back and consider the parts of our conversation and what worked/didn’t work! It also let him see how often each person was contributing (if one person dominated the whole conversation, there would be only one color).

My second post will include a couple more therapy ideas and visuals to consider when working with kids with social-cognitive/pragmatic language impairments. Hopefully these ideas spark your own creativity!

Big Deal, Little Deal? A Lesson in Executive Function

Executive Function/EF/Exec Func.:

We’ve all heard about it, often in conjunction with TBI-related impairments and rehabilitation. As research in our field continues though, we are finding that this small category of impairment may not be so small after all. Executive function (EF) inefficiencies appear highly associated with social-cognitive deficits and difficulties with pragmatic language comprehension and use, an area impacting huge numbers of children (and adults) around the country. So having a solid understanding of EF is critical to appropriately addressing the needs of a diverse population of speech-language patients!

WHAT IS IT? EFs are the mental processes that direct cognitive, communicative, and social behaviors. They allow individuals to successfully plan, initiate, carry-out, monitor, and revise tasks and activities. You can think of EFs as little “secretaries” working around the clock to plan and manage everything going on around you.

WHERE DOES EF LIVE? EF functions stem from frontal lobe areas of the brain. This is why EF impairments tend to be so pervasive in traumatic brain injuries; the coup-contrecoup injuries almost inevitably impact frontal lobe well-being.

I keep hearing about Self-Regulation in association with EF. WHAT’S THE DEAL? Self-regulation of one’s behavior, mood, emotions, etc. is inherently tied to EF abilities. Self-regulation is one of the many processes controlled under the EF umbrella, and children who are often overly impulsive in their behaviors and decision-making will likely demonstrate additional EF challenges under closer scrutiny (including deficits in: planning, initiation/drive, self-monitoring, cognitive flexibility, generative thinking, and self-awareness).

HOW DO WE ASSESS EF? Good question! This is a toughy, mainly because these clients can often “pull it together” and appear ok on standardized tests and tasks performed in controlled testing environments (although admittedly for some, these environments may underestimate real world functioning). A good assessment for EF should always include systematic observations of the client in a variety of real-world contexts! Most standardized tests that exist for looking at EF issues are intended for adult patients (although the Behavioral Assessment of the Dysexecutive Syndrome for Children is one option in pediatrics), so obtaining high-quality assessment data for children requires some creativity and a good awareness of the skills necessary to be tested (ability to inhibit, ability to problem solve/plan/sequence, generative abilities/cognitive flexibility). Beyond standardized testing, here are other assessment measures that should be completed:

1. Interview: Talk with the client and their family about any personality and behavior changes (especially those that might be difficult to measure out of context). You can also ask your client about a typical day and the challenges they encounter.
2. Questionnaires: Adaptations of The Brock Adaptive Functioning Questionnaire or The Dysexecutive Questionnaire will allow you to create a questionnaire appropriate for the pediatric population! You can also use options like the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function, which has both a preschool form and an adolescent form.
3. Task-Specific “Interview”: Determine a task to be completed by the client. The task should include multiple steps and require various types of attention (sustained attention, alternating attention, etc.). Have the client make predictions about the difficulty of the task and projected success level before beginning. Then carefully observe the client during the task, encouraging them to engage in self-monitoring throughout it. Finally, review the task with the client, asking them how they think they did, how their performance compared to their prediction, and what strategies they used to succeed.
4. Observation: You should observe the client in a variety of naturalistic setting performing multi-step activities. Many of these kids can verbally tell you the steps to an activity, but fall apart when actually tasked with completing it.

HOW DO I MANAGE EF DEFICITS IN CHILDREN? This is a huge, ginormous (new word alert) question. Rather than delve into the chasm of management options out there, I will instead leave you with some functional worksheets I have created to help kids recognize their EF challenges, be able to talk about them, and problem-solve strategies for coping with those challenges.

The biggest treatment benefit I have noticed is incorporating LOTS of repetition of the key words you plan to use throughout intervention, and creating treatment resources that are clear, organized, and simple. Remember, these kids have trouble planning, initiating, persevering, self-monitoring, and controlling impulsivity, so activities with too many parts/steps will go right over their heads. I also find it important and helpful to remind kids why they are working on these skills: to make learning at school easier, to feel more organized, to be able to make friends more easily, to know when it’s the right time to talk in a group, etc. The carryover between these EF skills and improved pragmatic language/social-cognitive skills will impress and amaze you!

Big Deal, Little Deal Flowchart

Many of these kids have a hard time recognizing when a problem is REALLY BIG, and when a problem is totally minor. In other words, every problem is a crisis for them and they need to learn a way to coach themselves through these situations. This easy flow-chart I created is a good way to visualize the “coaching” process. To use the flowchart, begin by asking yourself: “Is this problem a big deal or a little deal?” If you accidentally ripped your paper while tearing it out of the binder, that’s a little deal and one you can go ahead and act upon (getting a new piece of paper). You then can quickly reflect on whether it should have been treated as a bigger deal, or if everything turned out ok. If the problem is a big deal, you should make a plan using the provided steps. Based upon that plan, you act and then review to decide whether your decision was a good one. This also works really well with decision-making for kids who agonize over every little decision. Your goal is to get them to ask themselves: “big deal or little deal?” through self-coaching. I provided you with a link to the PDF of this document-just make sure to ask for permission before handing it out (thanks)!

Impulse control is really hard for this population, so giving these kids a clear definition of when it’s appropriate to speak your thoughts and when it’s not is super important! With something as basic as the page above, you can practice writing out thoughts that need to stay in your head (because blurting them out would be inappropriate/hurt someone’s feelings/make someone feel uncomfortable/etc.). You can even theme the bubble thought activity: what are some thoughts you are likely to have in X class at school that should stay in your head? Or, what are some thoughts you might have when talking to X that should stay in your head?

Helping these kids to figure out how they learn best and then supporting them in becoming strong self-advocates is a great tool for school success! I would pair this resource with a simple document like the one below, so kids can choose a few methods that work well for them and regularly review them to make sure they are using/asking for those modifications and supports when necessary!

I sincerely hope this post has given you a good place to start when it comes to incorporating EF treatment into your intervention plan for kids with these types of challenges! Let me know how the treatment goes 🙂