F Words

Date: 3/11/2010

Gender/Age: 4 year old little girl; long blond hair; walks around with perma-grin on her face

Locale: Speech Room

Alias:  H

Our school is divided into two "teams."  Each team consists of a Special Education teacher (myself and Miss A are each responsible for a team), the shared speech/language pathologist (SLP), one SLP assistant, and classroom teachers (paraprofessionals [teaching assistants]).  

Our students who qualify for special education services based on articulation delays (as well as those who qualify for this service in additional to their other needs) are pulled from class each day to receive approximately 15 minutes of speech/language services in the speech room.

Under the direction of the SLP, her assistants work on particular phonemes, or "sounds," that each child needs to correctly produce and then generalize into words . . . followed by sentences and finally pronounce correctly during conversational speech. 

On this particular day, the SLP assistant for my team (Miss M [we have lots of teacher names starting with M in our building--lol]) was working on the sound "F" with a handful of students.  They all worked through the lesson with varied success and at the conclusion, Miss M handed out their homework and told them to keep working really hard on their "F Words" at home.

H's eyes grew as big as saucers and her permanent-happy-go-lucky-grin faded into a look of extreme seriousness, and absolute worry, as she said, "Oh . . . . NO!  We aren't supposed to say 'F Words' at our house!!!"