Talk About Planning

Help students with reduced social or organisational skills. Help them learn the language of future oriented thinking as you teach them a very useful skill!

This book was developed for teachers and speech/language pathologists helping students improve functional language and communication development. Target skill areas include:

• organisation
• future-oriented thinking
• verb tense agreement
• sequencing
• time concepts
• language of probability
• interactive communication
• social language
• perspective-taking
• goal setting
• problem solving
• generalisation

All of these skills are used in planning and talking about planning. Planning, or understanding plans and talking about future events is often difficult for students with language impairment and/or executive functioning disorders. Also, students weak in social skills and social language areas often find planning future events overwhelming. Students with Asperger's Syndrome or higher functioning autistic students have particular difficulty planning future events.

Goal setting, laying event sequences out into the future, projecting outcomes and preparing to problem solve–all of these abstract notions are most challenging for students weak in organisational or social skills---all of these areas are targeted in this book!

This book includes:

• activities to strengthen specific language to talk about planning; time concepts and probability terms
• structured "plan units" featuring activities for younger children
• introduction of the "time line"
• structured "plan units" featuring activities for older students
• activities for developing new plans based on former plans

Structured activities offer students plenty of practice in vocabulary development, sentence formulation and generating cohesive multi-sentence passages. These activities are designed to offer students enjoyable activities as they gain a new and useful tool to add to their communication repertoire.