Service Learning In Speech Therapy - Project Recap #1
If you’re interested in service learning in speech therapy and haven’t read my introduction article, check it out here. It tells you everything you need to know about service learning and how to implement it into your speech room this year!
Our First Service Learning Project - Socks for homeless teenagers
Our first service learning project was more learning for me than the students! My co-teacher and I made a lot up as we went along, and I encourage you to do the same! You will learn things and have new ideas as you go along, so I strongly suggest that you go with the flow and follow the students’ ideas and interests.
Students/Teachers Involved For this project, I worked with our 9-12 Resource Room English teacher. We also involved the math teacher…more on that later! Because every school, district, and state have different “labels” for students, let me elaborate a bit further about the students we selected. The students for this project have learning disabilities that make learning in a general education classroom difficult. However, they can participate in the general education curriculum when it is taught in a smaller class and with a slower pace. About 75% of the students have speech therapy as a related service. We did most of the activities during my weekly push-in to their English class. We targeted many of their ELA Extended Standards and their speech goals throughout the project.
Choose a topic We did this project in 2019…well before I ever thought I’d be blogging about it. I’m a bit fuzzy on how we landed on our topic, but I THINK our class brainstormed a lot of ideas and put them on a Jamboard (if that’s not how it happened, it is still a good idea!) We narrowed topics down and landed on (drumroll please) Homeless Teenagers. I DO remember that the co-teacher and I were pleasantly surprised by how interested and empathetic our students were toward the topic from the jump.
Learn! We did a few different activities to learn about homeless teens. The goal was to build empathy while targeting speech goals and ELA standards.
Research - I came up with a few questions about homelessness. I wrote each question on a slide and shared the presentation with the students. We assigned each student a slide. The students researched their question and added their answer to their slide. We also asked each student to add a picture to their slide. After all of the slides were complete, we did a mini presentation where each student shared their slide. Then we thought of questions we still had about the topic.
Note: These slides were only about homelessness. We also did a deck specific to homeless teens, but I can’t find it!
Learn from an expert - We invited a speaker from Columbus Ohio’s Community Shelter Board to speak to our students. They were extremely excited to speak to our students. In my opinion, bringing in an expert is a step that should not be skipped. The students were really engaged and learned a lot from someone they viewed to be an authority. The guest speaker taught us a lot about why homelessness occurs, services the Shelter Board provides, and the biggest challenges facing homeless teenagers.
YouTube - I am so glad I teach in the YouTube era! I found a few short news stories and documentaries from YouTube about homeless teens. The videos I found interviewed homeless teenagers and outlined how many of them found themselves homeless. After each video, we engaged the class in a discussion. This activity helped the students build empathy. They really related to the teens and showed genuine concern for this ongoing problem.
Reflect and empathize At this point in the project, we were still unsure of what we wanted to do to help homeless teens, but my co-teacher and I were leaning toward doing a item drive. We asked the students to write a paragraph about one item they would want to have if they were homeless. This activity built empathy and targeted important ELA standards. I made a graphic organizer and template to make things easier, and the teacher made a rubric.
Make a plan We shared our paragraphs with the class and began brainstorming on the whiteboard about what items we might want to collect for a local homeless shelter for teenagers that we’d learned about from our guest speaker. The criteria was they had to be easy to buy, inexpensive, and useful. We spent a lot of time explaining why houses, swords (yes, swords), and money were not great options. We finally landed on…..SOCKS! They are actually one of the most requested items at homeless shelters, they are easy to buy, and are inexpensive. Mission accomplished!
Nuts and bolts In order to collect as many socks as we could, we had to spread the word about sock drive. Each student made a poster using Canva templates. We also wrote an announcement to be read on our school’s news show.
We ended up collecting over 300 pairs of socks! This is where the math teacher came in. The students counted the socks and did some fun math problems with the socks (for example: if we have 300 pairs, how many individual socks do we have?)
The Community Shelter Board was very excited to receive the donation and assured us that they would help many teens in our community.
Celebrate! We made a trifold poster about our project to share with the school. We also got to go to a local service learning summit where we got to share our project with other local schools. If your community offers anything like this, I can’t recommend it enough. It was really fun to see our students engage with peers around the community.
Looking back This was by far my favorite service learning project that we’ve done. Personally, I learned a lot about the issues that lead to homelessness. These issues are shockingly common and affect the students that I teach. After completing this project, I think I became better equipped to come to school as a more compassionate and caring SLP. I now always keep a sign of local housing resources displayed prominently in my classroom and have shared the list with my colleagues. There are a lot of resources available for families and teens if they know where to find them.
Ready to get started? I hope you’re inspired to complete a service learning project after reading this. Don’t forget to check out my full breakdown about service learning. I also learned a lot of what I know from an organization that our district partners with called Partnerships for Authentic Learning and Leadership. They have a much more detailed framework for service and project based learning. Your district may have a similar partnership, or check out their amazing programming. You can also leave a comment or email me kelly@highschoolslp.com!
