Describing Goal Ideas
- Given a visual, NAME will describe a familiar object by its category in 4 out of 5 opportunities across 3 consecutive sessions.
- Given a sentence starter, NAME will describe an object by its category and 1 or more additional features in 4 out of 5 opportunities.
- Given a familiar visual, NAME will describe pictures by category and two or more key attributes in 75% of opportunities.
- NAME will describe a pictured object in 3 or more ways in 8/10 opportunities given a familiar visual.
Read more about my goals here.
Describing Resources
Here are my favorite resources that target describing skills for speech therapy:
Teaching Describing Skills in Speech Therapy
Describing takes the foundational skill of Categories + Word Associations and builds upon it, expanding the number of attributes your students are able to name for each object.
Examples of features your learners can use to describe items are:
- Category: What group is it in?
- Function/Action: What does it do? How can you use it?
- Appearance: What does it look like? What is its shape, color, and size?
- Sensory Features: What does it feel like? Smell like? Taste like? Sound like?
- Location: Where can you find or see this item?
- Parts: What parts does it have?
- Unique Attributes: What makes this thing unique or different from other similar things?
Describing items in many different ways like this builds word depth of knowledge and continues to build a more organized, efficient semantic network of vocabulary words. It builds a complete semantic representation of each targeted word. Because of this, this intervention can be an effective way to improve word-finding difficulties as well (in addition to targeting a word’s phonology).
Describing Skills in Context
Describing is one of the easiest foundational language skills to teach in context! You can easily incorporate direct describing work into a themed unit, picture book, game, or text. In fact, it can be applied and practiced using nearly any content area or classroom topic!
I’ve even had great success targeting describing skills to describe characters from my students’ favorite TV shows!
Download the free themed unit linked below to see an example of how I might target describing in context, using a relatable theme of “trees” by clicking here.
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