Assessing Play Skills- In the Playground!

Assessing Play Skills- In the Playground!

Preschool therapy can be so fun, even when the little ones tire you out with their boundless energy.

If you’ve read the rest of the posts in this series, you have scrounged up your materials, using a few of the suggested items on the list in this blog post. You’ve been working for a week or two with your book.  The kids’ literacy skills are improving and they love the games and crafts you have been doing.  Your students have increased their language to talk about your theme during these structured activities.

So, what is missing?

tips fo assessing play skills on the playground

PLAY

Play is such an important part of learning for young children that it is vital to include it in your therapy sessions. When children really have the language that you have been modeling, you will see it emerge in their play.

The opposite relationship is also true! If the child has not yet used the language, but begins to demonstrate comprehension of the concepts in play, the language is more likely to emerge!

A Bit of Background

If you work with young children and are not already familiar with the play scale from Carol Westby, download it NOW!

 

Patricia Prelock wrote an excellent chapter on understanding and assessing play, which you can download here.

 

If you are looking for an overview of research on play and the findings, you can access a great article by Lifter et al. (2011) here.

 

Observing Play

What better spring theme for preschoolers than the playground?  Observe your students while they’re out there.

Social Interactions

Students may be using “my turn” and “please’” under our watchful eye in the therapy room. If it isn’t being used on the playground, you still have some generalization work to do. Some kids may be interacting with each other on the equipment while others may be following their own agenda. If this is the case, check to see if they are at least looking at the other kids occasionally to see what everyone else is up to. It gives you some important information for determining their independent level of play.

 

Cause/Effect

The student who pushes the kid in front of him on the slide and then looks bothered when the child screams his way down may have weak prediction and cause-effect skills. This child is just acting on a desire to be done waiting and may not be
able to think ahead  and plan yet. Time to work some safety issues into your playground play!

 

Wandering

You may say see some students, especially those with ASD, wandering aimlessly around the area rather than engaging in the playground activities.  While there can be many components to this, one of them is likely to be unfamiliarity with exactly what is expected. These students may need to be taught specific, concrete activities to do in the play area.

 

Now that you have observed, what can you do about it in therapy? Here is a literacy set  and a visual sentence building activity set to get you started, but come back next week for some tips! 

 

Enjoy!

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I’m Linda, an SLP who loves helping you build effective communication skills for your students using strategies and visuals. Pictures are time consuming, so let me make your life easier!

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