As many of you probably know, I am a speech language pathologist. I work part time in a school and part time for a private pediatric therapy company. I have been very lucky this year to have a speech assistant at my school. She does all of the speech therapy sessions under my supervision, while I handle all of the paperwork and evaluations. I have had a crazy number of evals this year. I think I'm close to 60- in 9 months.
One of the things that I look for during an evaluation is a child's conversational skills. I look for things like, can they introduce, maintain and manipulate a topic? Or, when I ask them about their favorite movie do I get a response about a peanut butter sandwich? Can they take turns appropriately or are they always interrupting or ending a topic after one turn?
I recently worked with a boy who was very shy. He responded to everything I asked him, but never initiated conversation himself. After we were done with all the formal testing I asked if he wanted to color. I wanted to see how long I would have to be quiet before he initiated some sort of exchange. I finally gave up after 8 minutes.
This is the picture I drew during those looooooooong and silent 8 minutes.
My favorite things about my picture:1) The 100 year oak in the side yard.
2) The cobblestone path to the front door.
3) The pool with diving board in the other side yard.
4) The lovely meadow in the front yard.
5) The slate roof.
6) The black lacquered front door.
2 comments:
You crack me up! I hope you hung it on the fridge!
That's a lot of detail in 8 minutes. Nice job Natalie.
=)
Post a Comment