Reading Between the Lines, 1st Edition

“The sheer large number of examples available (300 texts) allows for a number of sessions to be focused around inferencing without repetition (or boredom) to occur, the examples are very diverse but also clear and applicable to the children in my caseload. Scenarios are very much reflective of everyday life situations which the child will encounter at some point (Kudos for generalisation of therapy skills!).

Photocopiable pages! A therapist’s dream come true, photocopy an example and make your session interactive, highlighting and/or underlining important text before asking the question allows the child an opportunity to evaluate the importance of key texts.

So if you are considering new resources for your inferencing therapy sessions, I’d say ‘Go for it’, incredibly useful resource. You won’t run out of things to do.” — Kalifa, London Speech Therapy

Catherine Delamain is a paediatric speech and language therapist. She started her speech therapy career in an audiology unit, working with deaf and partially hearing babies and young children. She gained a Nuffield scholarship and spent a year in the United States studying differential diagnosis of language disorder. She has worked closely with colleagues in early years education, in playgroups, nursery schools, mainstream and special schools, and was instrumental in setting up dedicated speech and language bases in mainstream schools in Dorset, and a special needs playgroup. Her last post was team leader for education in Dorset’s large speech and language therapy service, where she also formed part of the autism assessment team. Since partial retirement, she has collaborated in setting up a training programme for teachers, aiming to help first and primary school teachers give effective support to children with speech, language and communication needs. She continues to run seminars for teachers in partnership with a senior educational psychologist.

Jill Spring is a speech and language therapist specializing in Specific Language Impairment in children. She has worked across the range of paediatric settings, including community clinics, assessment centres, opportunity playgroups and mainstream schools. She is currently the lead clinician and Base Leader in a resourced speech and language provision in a mainstream school. Her role as Base Leader requires up-to-date working knowledge of the National Curriculum and pupil assessment and tracking systems. She works in close collaboration with teachers and the local authority to ensure pupils with speech, language and communication needs are identified early and appropriately supported. In addition, she is part of a multidisciplinary team for diagnosing autism spectrum conditions in children and young people and part of a multi-agency working party investigating the links between behaviour problems and speech, language and communication difficulty in young children.