For this objective, I wanted to learn how to plan my own therapy activity where I could choose certain goals and meet them. There takes a lot of planning to develop activities for a therapy session, especially for preschoolers. All of the materials need to be prepared and ready before the children enter the room because at this age, their attention spans are short and you only have a limited time to work with them.
 
      To complete this objective, I started by observing the individual and group therapy sessions conducted by my supervisor. I would observe her strategies and her interactions with the children. Slowly, she would incorporate me into the activities. For example:  if a therapy session had just 2 children, the speech pathologist would work with one of the children and model what I should do, and then I would work with the other child, following her lead. I also participated in the group activities. My supervisor would conduct the activity with the first group, and I would facilitate the same activity with the second group after watching how the speech pathologist performed it prior.
 
      By helping to prep materials, create materials, observe, and co-facilitate activities, I was prepared at the end of the semester to create my own activity and facilitate it with all of the 3 year old groups. Since the date of my activity was near Thanksgiving, I decided to work with the story “The 10 Fat Turkeys”. My goals for the activity were to practice counting from 0-10, practice naming colors, as well as practice spatial location. After reading the story, I hid a stuffed animal turkey and gave each of the children a chance to find it and tell me where they found it using spatial location terms (UNDER the table, ON the chair, IN the basket).
 
      It was a very successful activity that the children enjoyed. Almost all of the children could successfully count from 0-10, name the 10 colored turkeys, and describe where they found the turkey. As I conducted the activity, my supervisor took notes on which children could not successfully do these tasks so that they could be worked on in further therapy sessions. Whereas most individual therapy sessions at the preschool are focused on the child’s speech or articulation, the goals of my activity were geared towards language. The preschool I interned at is an inclusionary preschool, meaning that the classes consisted of normally developing students as well as students with special needs. The group therapy sessions consisted of all of these children, helping them to practice language.
 
      Through completing this objective I learned how to tailor certain activities to certain children with different goals. I also became proficient with the computer application, Board Maker, used to make activity materials. In addition, I learned how important it is to prep materials and to include a follow-up activity, like the spatial location and coloring activities, to help reinforce the prervious activity and information.
 
      By observing and co-facilitating many therapy sessions, I was able to use a lot of information from my phonetics class. In phonetics I learned to categorize sounds based on what articulators (lips, teeth, tongue, etc) are used to produce it. Knowing this information helped me to model the proper articulation of sounds for the children [ex: bite your lip to produce the labio-dental (lips and teeth) sound /f/]. Although this information does not directly relate to the activity that I created, it relates to many of the other therapy activities that I participated in throughout the semester.
 
      Located below are pictures of the materials I used for my activity as well as pictures taken during the activity. The pictures also include the worksheet for my follow-up activity and one of the children working on the worksheet. Also included in my evidence is a recording of one of the students explaining where he found the turkey.