Supporting children with word finding difficulties in the classroom

So you have a child in your class who has been seen by the Speech and Language Therapist who has explained to you that she has word finding (or word retrieval) difficulties.You've been given some information by the therapist on how to support her and you've searched for some ideas online yourself. Then you wonder... how do I implement these strategies? Do I need to send this child out for one to one support to work on these strategies or can they be worked on within the classroom? These are all the questions that flew through my mind the first time I taught a child who received this diagnosis and I'm here to explain how I implemented the strategies in my own classroom!

First I looked at the different strategies. There was pre-teaching of vocabulary, using prompts of sounds and descriptions for words, and then using games and activities to help the child to refile words so that they were easier for them to retrieve. Then I considered how different strategies could be used inside and outside of the classroom.

1. Pre-teaching vocabulary: I found that pre-teaching vocabulary for certain topics was so helpful for the individual child. It meant they had a head start on knowing the words before the topic came up and were more likely to offer up answers during whole class and group discussions. To pre-teach the vocabulary I would make up word mats of the vocabulary which could be sent home. The photograph on the right shows a word mat of vocabulary for our topic on the story of Little Red Riding Hood. I considered the key words that the child would need and used visuals to further support her being able to recall the words when we would later discuss the story. I then had my teaching assistant go over the words with her one to one. I also sent a copy of the mat home with her and explained to her parents that these would be key words in our work the following week on this story. 
2. Prompts during class: When it came to whole class and small group discussions I found that the child might still forget the word she was looking for. So I would use the prompts our speech therapist had explained. I would use fill in the blank sentences eg. When asking a question I might say 'Little Red Riding Hood met a ______ in the woods.' and wait for her to fill in the blank with wolf. Sometimes she would and other times she would need other prompts such as 'oh the big scary animal' or 'the animal that starts with a /w/ sound.' These promps support the child to file the word correctly in their mind so that next time they are asked a question they will be able to retrieve the word by remembering the associations that were used to support them to retrieve it last time. 
   
3. Dual support activities: So you may have only one child in the class with word finding difficulties and think this means you can't pair them up with another child to work on this specific skill. However, this is not true! You can pair children up to work on different skills but using the same game or activity. For example, this game to the right focuses on starting sounds and categories which would support a child with word finding difficulties to practice associating words with both their starting sound and the category they come in. However, you may have other children who would benefit from this type of game such as children who need further support with phonics and identifying starting sounds. There is nothing stopping you pairing these children up to play the same game or do the same activity while targetting different skills. 

What ways have you found to incorporate support activities into your classroom? If you have other ideas then I would love to hear them. You can leave ideas in the comments section below.