Targeted Skill Activities in Literacy-Based Therapy

Hi friend!

Here's an overview of step four in the literacy-based therapy framework:

🌟 Focused Skill Activities 🌟

This is a versatile step! During this step the clinician and students engage in a variety of language rich activities using the story for context. You can target almost any skill/goal with a good book!

I also like to refer to this phase as "skill based activities."

Activities focus on skills in one or more of the following areas:

1️⃣ Semantics

2️⃣ Syntax & Grammar

3️⃣ Narratives

4️⃣ Pragmatics

🔴 Semantics - these activities focus on learning new vocabulary and/or thinking about words and their relationships (e.g. synonyms, antonyms, describing, associations, multiple meanings)

🟠 Syntax & Grammar - these activities focus on sentence structures (e.g. compound &

complex sentences, clauses) and grammar (e.g. pronouns, verb tense,

plural nouns, auxiliary verbs)

🟡 Narratives - these activities first focus on one aspect of narration at a time (e.g. main idea, sequencing, story grammar, describing the main character) and then skills are combined in story retell or summarizing tasks

🟢 Pragmatics - these activities are based on a pragmatic skill from the text (e.g. problem solving, self advocacy, perspective taking)

Below are some examples of activities from my book companion for The Biggest Valentine Ever that target all four domains.

semantics

narratives

syntax

pragmatics

Within each of the domains, the clinician can target a variety of goals based on the students’ individual needs.

This step can take anywhere from 2-5 therapy sessions depending on the students' needs.

Throughout this step, it's important that the student’s know what skills they are learning beyond the activity. For example, the student should know they are learning how to retell a story or use more describing words, not that they are simply writing or playing with Boom Cards.

Want to read more? Take a peek at these blog posts:

🎯 Semantic Language Skills

🎯 Syntactic Language Skills 

🎯 Narrative Language Skills 

Have a wonderful week! ♥️

References:

Ukrainetz, T. A. (2006). Contextualized Language Intervention: Scaffolding Prek-12 Literacy Achievement (1st ed.). Pro Ed.