they typically have difficulty with ABSTRACT concepts.
It took me a while to really understand what that meant! As I watched my
daughter develop and learn during her toddler and preschool years it became
clear to me that these concepts were indeed difficult. I have copied one
definition below:
World English Dictionary
| abstract | |
| — adj | |
| 1. | having no reference to material objects or specific examples;not concrete |
| 2. | not applied or practical; theoretical |
| 3. | hard to understand; recondite; abstruse |
| 4. | denoting art characterized by geometric, formalized, or otherwise nonrepresentational qualities |
| 5. | defined in terms of its formal properties: an abstract machine |
| 6. | philosophy (of an idea) functioning for some empiricists as the meaning of a general term: the word ``man'' does not name all men but the abstract idea of manhood HOW INTERESTING. . . #3 says "hard to understand". . . so that means she is having difficulty understanding concepts that are hard to understand!!! Makes sense to me!!! Anyway--before I continue with posts about Speech Therapy activities I wanted to address this issue. As a Speech Pathologist, I have to take a certain number of continuing education courses per year. This year I took a course on "Processing Disorders"--Language Processing vs. Auditory Processing. (More on these in a future post.) The course was taught by Gail J. Richard, Ph.D., and she has written several books on the issue, including "The Source for Processing Disorders" and "Language Processing Treatment Activities" (along with Mary Anne Hanner, Ph.D.). These books list language concepts from most concrete to most abstract: Labeling Functions Associations Categories Antonyms Synonyms Similarities and Differences Multiple Meanings Idioms Analogies Think about the first one. . . the easiest one. . . "Labeling." What do we ask babies? "What's this?" "What's that?" We first teach babies to LABEL. Label people (Mama, Daddy). Label food (cookie, juice). Label objects (shoe, ball). These labels are often a baby's first words. When Sara started formal Speech Therapy, she was doing pretty well with Labeling (although word retrieval/recall was sometimes an issue--more on this in the future). So we started working our way down the list, beginning with Functions. I will probably refer back to this list of concepts often--and explain each in more detail, so I wanted to discuss it before continuing on with more activities. (The next post will address Speech Therapy activities to practice object functions.) |
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