If you want to diversify your speech therapy toolbox and learn lots of strategies that will help you learn how to target sentence expansion; read on!
Expanding sentences is an important goal for children with a variety of language abilities. Putting together longer sentences empowers students to share more specific language. Sentence expansion also increases the amount of information your students are able to share with others. Regardless of the length of the sentences you are hoping to target, this is an important and common goal that we treat as SLPs.
There are a lot of strategies that target sentence expansion and provide a useful shared context for you and your student. I want to share some other tips and strategies that you can use to get your students to combine words and improve their MLU.
Strategies for Targeting Sentence Expansion:
- Explicit Instruction
- Tell your students exactly what you expect of them. If you expect them to say two-word sentences, tell them that. When you want them to use subject-verb-object combinations, explain that and give specific examples. You must teach before you expect a student to demonstrate a new and challenging skill.
- Embrace repetition
- Students who struggle with combining words benefit from repetition.
- Repetition can come in the form of a repeating line in a book (see #3), an SLP/teacher/parent modeling, using sentence starters, etc.
- Repeated practice helps students become more automatic with this skill!
- Use books
- Books with repetitive lines provide the perfect opportunity to practice combining words.
- Brown Bear (Brown bear, Brown Bear, what do you see? I see a ____ looking at me).
- I went Walking (I went walking what did you see? I saw a _______)
- No, David (No, David!)
- Pete the Cat (I love my white shoes.)
- Incorporate movement
- Using gross motor activities is a fantastic way to get students excited and keep them engaged.
- Have students give you directions so that they practice producing sentences with a variety of verbs (e.g., ‘jump up’ or ‘walk fast’). Check out this action word bundle for a variety of materials perfect for targeting verbs and sentence expansion.
- Visual Supports
- There are so many ways to utilize visual supports to target sentence expansion:
- Use a white board to write a sentence (if your student is a reader).
- Utilize sentence strips to target a specific sentence.
- Use squares or circles to represent the number of expected words.
- Try these sentence strips included with every single one of my Worksheets for Mixed Groups!
- Incorporate Voice Output
- You can also incorporate voice output.
- Often times, students are not ready to communicate new phrases themselves.
- Having voice output provides modeling and takes the pressure off of a new task!
- If you want no-prep resources that include sentence strips AND voice output, consider these Seasonal Interactive Books.
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