Lighter Side

One of my funniest memories occurred in my first year of being an SLP. I was giving an articulation screening test to a first grader.
I carefully gave the instructions that I would say a word and he should repeat. The directions said to say the first few words three times to make sure the child understood the task and would hear the word clearly. The first word was rabbit so I said, “Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit.” The student answered, “Hop, hop, hop.”

I was giving a speech-language screen and asked an elementary student, “Where do you sleep?” 

With no hesitation, he said, “In class!”

“Recently I was asking “who” questions for an adult fluency patient and I was seeking fluent sentence response. 

The question was “Who carries passengers in the sky?” 

Her response was “God”.  My response was “not quite that high in the sky”.

“As a part of language re-evaluation I administered the CELF-4 to a third grader. As you know, the Semantic Relationship Subtest, requires you to list 4 words. The student is to tell which two words go together then give a reason why they go together.

On item #8 the 4 words are: dancing, caring, hearing, smelling. The correct answer would be of course ‘hearing & smelling’ because they are two of your five senses.

However this boy said ‘dancing & hearing”…and then I asked ‘Why?’ My friend responded with his 8 1/2 year old wisdom:

“When you are dancing with the girl of your dreams then you hear music.”

Let’s hope he keeps this attitude into adulthood!”

Several years ago, I was administering a phonological awareness task to a 6 year old student.  During the first section, she was able to tell me if two words rhymed. In, the next section had her create a rhyming word.  She was able to rhyme ‘can’ and ‘man’ as well as ‘pot’ with ‘hot.’  The next word was ‘wrinkle,’ so I reminded her she could make up words.  She repeated, “Wrinkle. Wrinkle.”, as if the word would magically come to her.  It did!  She threw her finger in the air and said, “I know….BOTOX!”

I worked in a school for many years and the secretary would occasionally call me to “interpret” what some of my students were requesting when sent to the office. She called me one morning to ask for my help as a 1st grade student came in and told her that he wanted to go to the north. She laughed when I told her that he needed to see the “nurse”. The same day the same 1st grade teacher asked me to come to her class as she had a student who wanted to share his revelation as he now knew the “cause of aids”. I went into the class and asked him privately if he would tell me what it was. He asked for a piece of paper, pencil and proceeded to write “cursive ‘A’s”.

I was working with a first grader on the /r/ sound. Using picture cards for prompts, he turned over an /r/ card that had a picture of a beaver on it. The child then said, “Hey, just like Justin Beaver” (a.k.a. Justin Bieber). I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing! Children are precious!

I was working with a first grade fluency little boy one day and we were using animal pictures to practice slow, easy speech. When he turned over the cow picture he proudly said,”I know lots of cows! There are whole cows, 2% cows, 1% cows , and skim cows!” It was such a cute moment.

I was asking a Kindergarten student to recall the various bugs that we read about in our book about spring and he was able to come up with one or two. Using a cloze procedure to help him recall the rest I said, “remember the red one with the black spots? It was a lady…” The student responded, “Gaga!” Now that he remembered!

During one of my small groups of two young boys with autism, I was using my “What’s Missing” puzzles to work on pronouns and correct sentence production. I gave each child one half of the puzzle and they had to tell me a sentence of what that person was missing while using the correct pronoun. Mind you…all of these puzzles are quite obvious in what they’re missing (i.e. a girl just holding onto a leash. She’s missing her dog.) Well, it was Jared’s turn and he received the puzzle piece of a man walking out of his house with a shirt, suit jacket, heart boxers, socks and shoes on. So I ask the question, “Jared, what is this man missing?” He states confidently…”His keys!” Apparently Jared doesn’t feel that pants are that important to wear when walking out of your house when going to work. Cracked me up!!