This e-mail was sent to me a while ago and I came across it again tonight...Pray it helps someone else too.


Also I know some of you have talked about SCERTS and mentioned Emily Rubin. When she lived in Mass, she was our SP&L consultant. She went into the school and developed a color coded visual support program that was AMAZING in helping develop *****'s language.

***** had a color coded sentence strip with squares that were for the agent, the action and the object of a sentence.
So the agent might be green the object might be red and the action yellow. Then he had a book full of pcitures where the agents, the actions and the objects were on backgrounds of the colors that matched.

The speech therapist could talk to ***** about something from his day or take a photo of him at a particular activity (say in gym) and say to him. What did you do in gym?

She would then work with ***** and show him how to match the colored picture to colored squares on the strip that would produce the sentence "I" (the agent) "played catch" (the action) "with the ball" (the object).

You cannot believe how his language blossomed as the speech and language therpist used this method with him!!
You should also know he was about 15 at the time!!!! Imagine how using this with young children would help their language grow?

As I said, I am a firm believer in the importance of visual supports!

I've included a link to an awesome website too (Linda Hodgdon, the visual guru!!) where you can get great information and sign up for a free newsletter.
www.lindahodgdon.com