Scheduling Efficient Make-Up Therapy Sessions

Winter is here, and with it come seasonal illnesses. I'm fighting a bad cold as I am typing this. If you are anything like me, you hate missing work because it is impossible to find the time in our busy schedules to squeeze in make-up sessions. However, life happens and sometimes you just have to take a day off. I figured I should write a post on how I try to do make-up sessions efficiently, getting as many kids seen as possible in the least amount of time while providing an adequate learning experience. Be aware that when you run large group lessons, you will need access to an adequate amount of space - make sure to reserve a spare classroom / conference room beforehand!

Before you get started, you will need to make a list of students working on like goals or at similar skill levels. Your group may have 5 students, or it may have 10, whatever works for you! Some examples of students I might group together are as follows:

• all 12 of my SDC students
• all of my 1st/2nd grade students with language goals
• all of my students working on a particular sound
• students with social skill needs

Once you have your list of students that will get seen together, you will decide on an activity to do with them. Some of my favorite large group activities include:

Guess Who is a favorite!

• Jeopardy (see this related blog post) - I love this because it is versatile and can be adapted for artic, language, social skills, etc.
• Guess Who - this game can easily be adapted into a large group activity for the classroom. It targets multiple skills and is always a hit with my SDC students!
• Read a book to the group and work on comprehension
• Felt board stories are great to work on comprehension and vocabulary with younger students, and they are hands-on
• Target a specific social skill - you could do a Volume lesson using the 5-point scale, read "Have You Filled a Bucket Today?", etc. 
• Speech stations - with large articulation groups, you can rotate the students through stations, at each of which they work independently. I am planning a blog post on activities to include at Stations, so stay tuned!
• Play 20 Questions - Have a student take turns thinking of a mystery item, while the other students in the group ask Yes/No questions and attempt to guess the item
• Charades - this is another great group activity, because you can have students split up into separate teams  

These are just a few ideas to get started... by seeing students in larger groups for make-up sessions, you can save time for other important tasks and make sure everyone is getting seen. Can you think of any other great activities that lend themselves to large groups? Please leave a comment!