For expressive language, 21% made more than 18 months progress and 27% made more than 12 months progress. This is considerably greater progress than is expected over an 8 month period.

Each weekly session lasts between 20 – 30 minutes and consists of approximately six activities. Ideally, each session should involve six children and be run by two adults in a quiet room with few distractions. The sessions are similar each week, creating a familiar structure for children to feel comfortable within. For comprehension, 7% made over 18 months progress and 18.5% made over 12 months progress. Again, this is impressive over 8 months.

l “Spirals has helped my child to be more calm, he’s nicer to talk to and he’s learned to listen without arguing” As a result of her linguistic profile, Dinky is a child who is likely to fall behind her peers in all areas of linguistic and social development. Although contrarily to many of the other scores, the RAPT has been validated in multiple countries and continents with relatively similar results between different institutions

Spirals is designed to be universal. Elements of Spirals could easily be incorporated into group times. Some settings are already doing this and seeing the advantages. It is presented, via computer, with 4 pictures to choose from, the target picture, a grammatical error, a lexical error and a distracter.

Benefits of the Assessment of Comprehension and Expression

For the Spirals Parent Workshops, an invite was sent out to the parents or carers of each child. The invite explained the workshop and asked that an adult attend to support their child. It was suggested that if a parent couldn’t attend, an Aunt, Uncle or Grandparent could attend instead. The staff in the schools were very supportive and promoted the workshops to the parents and carers. The Spirals workshop consisted of a fun activity in which the parent worked with their child to make a language game that could be played at home. The parents then had an opportunity to observe or participate in a live example of a Spirals group. Time was given for questions and evaluation and an ‘Ideas for home learning’ sheet was given to each parent, suggesting simple methods for extending their child’s speaking, listening and understanding by using everyday situations and objects. The workshops took place in the schools and were run by Laura Halstead and supported by a teaching assistant or member of school staff. Laura Halstead presented the data and facilitated some discussion around the outcomes of the project and developments for the future. Below are some of the discussion points. Laura will be offering one morning and one afternoon nursery group to St John Fisher school as well as one foundation group.

Widely used by Speech and Language Therapists / Pathologists, SENCOs, and teachers, among other professionals, the test covers words used to convey information (i.e. nouns, verbs, prepositions); present, past and future tenses; irregular forms of plural and past tenses; simple and complex sentence construction; and passive voice. The test provides an Information and Grammar score that can be benchmarked against a UK school population. These aims fit in with the aims of Every Child Matters http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/everychildmatters/ in the following areas. that confirmed the usefulness of RAPT in postoperative orientation and that old age, living alone, and patient's preference were determining factors for discharge management. In a study from 2015, conducted on 3,213 American subjects, RAPT accurately predicted discharge disposition for high- and low-risk subjects. Schools are already using the BPVS (British Picture Vocabulary Scales) to measure a child’s vocabulary at the start and end of the school year. This assessment also has EAL factored into it. Given that vocabulary at age 5 is the best predictor of whether children who experience social deprivation in childhood escape poverty in later adult life, this seems like the best tool to use to measure impact.

Age range

The RAPT produced a raw score of 23 ½ for information, age equivalent 3yrs 6mths, where 24 is the mean of the range19-27 and a raw score of 20 for grammar, age equivalent 4 yrs 0mths So, earlier today I posted a blog about the Speech and language assessment… Well, about an hour ago I received the report… I have edited names and deleted any personal information for anonymity purposes. Children will seem to be functioning at a higher level than they actually are. Teachers may wrongly assume a level of comprehension based on their expressive language. Therefore, it is impressive that so many children are making good amounts of progress (between 1 and 8 months) and even more impressive that a large number are making more progress than expected (over 8 months). The 95 participants were chosen in collaboration with the Teachers and leaders of the settings. The participants were aged between 3 and 5 years old.

We discussed the assessments and how the 2D assessment pictures might be too far removed from the 3D, hands-on, practical fashion in which children learn and understand concepts within a Spirals session. Assess children’s expressive vocabulary skills through presenting a series of pictures that children have to name. of children made more than 8 months’ progress in 8 months for expressive language (see blue portion of pie chart). Every parent who attended said that they had found the workshop useful. These are some of the comments they left on the evaluation sheet at the end of the workshop.Regarding this perspective, in the last years, the attention has been focalized on patients' postoperative management, especially on the inpatient length of stay (LOS) after surgery, encouraging early discharge from hospitals and substitution with home-based alternatives whenever appropriate. After working mainly with school children in Lancashire and Nottingham she was appointed Chief Speech Therapist to the United Oxford Hospitals in 1953. During 1964-6, with leave of absence, she taught speech pathology as Visiting Lecturer at the University of Toronto. After leaving her post in Oxford in 1973, she travelled widely, lecturing in all five continents.