Holy Moly Whole Body Listening

Let’s play a game called concrete or abstract. I’ll say a word and you decide if it’s concrete (simple to picture, describe and define) or abstract (context-based, dynamic, challenging to consistently define). Here we go:

1. MOOSE: Concrete or Abstract?

2. SUCCESS: Concrete or Abstract?

3. FORK: Concrete or Abstract?

4. LISTENING: Concrete or Abstract?

Today’s post is all about number four: Listening. Despite being one of the most common words I hear in K-8 classrooms (and I have no doubt it’s a high frequency word in high school as well), LISTENING is an abstract concept. My image of listening may be very different than your image of listening. Listening on the playground may look different than listening during a math lesson. Some teachers want students to listen with their ears alone, while others expect students to freeze whatever they might be doing in order to listen. Neurotypical students struggle to form consistent rules for listening, so imagine how challenging this is for children with language processing challenges, lack contextual awareness, challenges recognizing social cues, and overly rigid interpretations of social situations. We need a hero!!!!!

WHOLE BODY LISTENING to the rescue! Whole Body Listening (WBL) is a term coined by Susanne Poulette Truesdale in 1990, and later adopted into the Social Thinking Curriculum (Michelle Garcia Winner). The goal of WBL is to transform an abstract concept (listening) into a concrete, highly comprehendible one. Rather than require children to determine what is meant by “Listen to me,” each part of the body is described as either active/on or quiet/off:

Active/On:

• Ears are hearing what is being said
• Eyes are looking at the speaker
• Brain is thinking about what is being said
• Heart is caring about how the speaker is feeling
• Body (upper body) is facing the speaker

Quiet/Off:

• Mouth is quiet
• Hands are quiet and not distracting self or others
• Feet are quiet and not distracting self or others

Reinforcing WBL requires a shift from “Listen to me,” “I need everyone listening,” and “I’ll wait until the whole class is listening” to “I’m waiting for quiet mouths and eyes looking at me,” “Let’s be whole body listeners; brains, ears, eyes, and hearts on and mouths, hands, and feet quiet,” and “I will know you’re listening with your whole body when your hands and feet are quiet.” Taking the guesswork out of listening allows children to more quickly and easily understand the whole-body expectations of being a strong listener, allowing them to engage more successfully in classroom tasks.

At The School of The Madeleine in Berkeley, CA, we are bringing WBL to every classroom, K-8. Here are some creative ways to teach WBL skills to students in all grades:

Kindergarten through 2nd Grade: Read the Whole Body Listening Larry Books to teach students the components of WBL with the help of Larry, a lovable illustrated character: Whole Body Listening Larry at School by Kristen Wilson and Elizabeth Sautter and Whole Body Listening Larry at Home by Kristen Wilson and Elizabeth Sautter. You can then play “Larry says,” a spin-off of “Simon Says.”

 

3rd through 5th Grade: Create crazy character collages and ask students to label whether the parts of WBL are being done in an expected way or an unexpected way.

6th through 8th Grade: Collaborate with students to translate the traditional WBL Larry poster (most appropriate for younger students) into a foreign language being taught across the school. Additionally, older students can be encouraged to reinforce WBL for younger students during assemblies, transitions, buddy activities, etc.

Whole School: Encourage “contagious quiet” across all grades in a school. Create a hand sign that represents WBL (like a ‘W’ with your fingers) and challenge students to see how quickly they can all “catch the quiet” when they see the hand sign.

A happy child is a child who feels successful, and WBL is a fantastic strategy to allow all students to feel like successful listeners!

All Aboard the Friend Ship

Remember when you had to memorize all the presidents of the United States for U.S. History Class…in order?!? It took me about 2 minutes of blankly staring at flash cards to realize I was never going to cement those names through repetition alone. So where does one turn for help at 10:00pm the night before the test? Music, of course! The Animaniacs saved my tush that night with their president song (proof here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vvy0wRLD5s8). Kids are a lot like me when it comes to learning (or should I say I learn a lot like a little kid…): they do better with multimodal, experiential, and “stuck-in-your-head” leaning styles than mere lecture from adults.

Raise your hand if you find it easier to engage kids in post-play cleaning when you sing the “Clean up, clean up, everybody, everywhere…” song (did you really raise your hand? No one can see you, silly!). That’s because the song jumpstarted a memory for the child (hippocampus activation) that it’s time to clean. We use songs in all corners of education: ABC’s, rainbow colors, counting, wh-questions, etc. I think I can skip the part where I spend a whole paragraph convincing you why songs matter for learning, because our scientific community has already agreed that music activates important association and learning centers in the brain. Instead, I want to introduce you to my favorite new set of songs for facilitating social regulation, social cognitive, and social emotional development: The Friend Ship.

You may or may not know that I spend my days targeting social regulation skills with “boys and girls of all ages” (yeah, it’s a bit like the circus!). I am forever on the hunt for innovative ways to help my clients both learn and generalize the key concepts of expected social communication, and music is a personal favorite strategy of mine. The Friend Ship, created by speech-language pathologist Erica Bland, is a CD of songs all about social regulation. With titles like: “What’s the Plan,” “Adding to the Fun,” and “What Zone Are You In,” the songs take teaching and reinforcement phrases I find myself using like a broken record and puts them to a soundtrack of kid-friendly rock, reggae, and hip hop. Whether the songs are used as direct teaching tools or are just on as background music during collaborative play, I find that my clients are humming and singing along after the first couple replays.

Want a sneak peak? Have a listen: https://soundcloud.com/thefriendship-1/sets/the-friend-ship

So how do you get this musical gold mine? Here are a couple ways to make it happen (p.s. it’s only $9.95!!!!!):

• Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Friend-Erica-Bland-David-Ramani/dp/B00J49OVMG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1407605118&sr=8-1&keywords=the+friend+ship+erica+bland
• Friend Ship Website: http://www.thefriendshipforkids.com/buy.html
• iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/the-friend-ship/id843091601 

Erica also created a companion packet of family or therapist-led support activities to go along with each song. In other words, your lesson plan is already done! So drop whatever you’re doing, pump up the Friend Ship jams, and get your social regulation on!

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!