Middle School Materials and Motivators: Beating Middle School Malaise

I'm thrilled to team up with the Frenzied SLP and other bloggers to brainstorm about how to motivate our middle school students through this linky party!   Middle school children are a special group!  They are meeting social challenges and filled with self-doubt just at a time when they are expected to work cooperatively with others in groups.  To have a speech or language delay on top of it only contributes to the challenges children face at this age.  Not only have I worked with middle school children, I have raised two of my own and lived to tell about it!  I'm excited to share some tips that I found helpful when working with middle schoolers with speech and social communication issues.

           Middle Schoolers and Articulation Intervention:
1.  Put thought into how you group your middle schoolers.  Don't put a self-conscious girl who needs help making a retro flex /r/ in the same group as a "cute" boy.  She's not going to want to roll her tongue or open her mouth in front of him!

2.  Take time to build a relationship with your middle school students.  Learn their likes and dislikes and really listen to them when they have a problem!  Incorporate their interests into therapy.  Do you have a middle school sports nut who can't say his r's?  Google the roster for his favorite team and find names on the roster that contain his target sound!  Bring sports illustrated for kid's reading material in to therapy.  You can find some Deals on Sport's Illustrated for Kids on Amazon!

3.  If possible,  incorporate their trusted friends into therapy.  I had a student whose friend came with her to speech for one session and learned to give her a nonverbal cue whenever she was distorting her /r/ sound or needed to slow down her speech.  If incorporating general education students into your sessions isn't an option, then try using their names in your materials.  I made a bingo game with one of my students that contained many of her friend's names that contained her target sound!  Personalizing your therapy materials to contain words that are meaningful to your students will help motivate them and help them generalize their articulation skills outside of the speech room!

4.  Incorporate writing skills into your articulation sessions.  Middle school students need practice writing complete and grammatically correct sentences.   Give your students a set of target words and have them write a story incorporating the words and then practice reading it.  

5.  Many middle school students enjoy current events and popular culture.   If you have a student like this and you are looking for reading material for articulation practice, try the online Smithsonian Tween Tribune.  Your students will love that you incorporate current events AND technology into their sessions!

7.  Many middle school children are still into Lego's.  I have stocked up on some Lego's and here's how I use them.  I will give them a LEGO piece for every target word or sound they produce correctly.  At the end of the session, they are given some time to build with the Lego's.  Lego's are also great for using as story writing prompts.  One of my middle school students with autism did not like to write stories until I let him write a story about what might be happening in one of his Lego sets.  I must not be the only educator who discovered this because LEGO now has their own Story Starter Curriculum!  Check it out!

    Middle School Social Skills Materials:

I am working on a set of social skills materials for use with middle school students and I just uploaded this middle school social communication product!   If that interests you, please check it out! 

     Language of Emotions: Nonverbal and Verbal! For middle and high schoolers!  It features real photographs and fun activities to work on identifying 15 core emotions and improving perspective taking in middle and high school students.  One of my own daughters was kind enough to pose for some of the photographs!

I hope you found at least one tip in this blog piece or one of the other blog pieces in this Middle School Motivators and Materials Linky that will assist you with breaking through the middle school malaise with your students!

                                                                  Donna