It is so important to have a good relationship with a client’s classroom teacher, especially if they have word-finding difficulties. The classroom curriculum vocabulary words are his world during the school day and we need to make sure the child is familiar with them and can easily call them up when needed.
I have worked with a range of classroom teachers, most of whom have been incredibly helpful. Recently a first grade teacher gave 
me a wonderful hand written list of words in their language arts curriculum for me to pre-teach. I so appreciate this and know that it takes extra time on her part. As we were going through the words, defining them, talking about them in context, and making up sentences with them we came to “ripple.” This is where our lesson plan took off in a new direction! As I was trying to define “ripple” for him, I searched the word on my iPhone and hit “images.” We started looking at varied but beautiful images of ripples in water as different numbers of rocks were thrown in the water, with different lighting, stages of the process and different settings. After we defined the word, we described the photographs and then compared how the current picture was different from the last. All of these activities were strengthening his vocabulary, descriptive and comparative skills and confidence in using language. It was such fun to watch his mind work as he got excited about seeing the next image, “He had a leaf and dipped it in the water,” or “That one’s my favorite because it looks like another dimension in the water!” Phew, that was quite a sentence from a guy who used to have some difficulty describing things. “That looks like a sculpture, just painted blue.” You get the idea, he was enjoying being a little abstract all because we happened upon some beautiful photographs of “ripples!”
