Speak Out OCTOBER 2021 DIGITAL EDITION

BRANCH NEWS SOUTH AUSTRALIA

1015 members

SA Branch celebrated Speech Pathology Week by giving out $50 grants to support local speechies with their #SPweek events! There were eight grant recipients who ran events in their local communities and workplaces. We also hopped aboard the national social media campaign, paying it forward to our colleagues and friends to share our message far and wide. Here is what some of the grant recipients got up to during Speech Pathology Week. Uni SA As part of this year’s Speech Pathology Week, a group of first year speech pathology students at UniSA - Veronica Edmonds, Victoria Rush, Chantal Younger and Sonia Terrington, put together a presentation for a local playgroup held at Manor Farm Kindergarten. The aim of the presentation was to deliver some general information to parents regarding the language development of toddler and preschoolers, and where to seek further assistance if they had questions about their child’s speech or language. The presentation was delivered by Veronica and Vicky on behalf of the whole group, and it received very positive feedback from staff and parents alike. After the presentation there was an opportunity for parents to chat about any concerns they had regarding their child/ren and it was a positive experience for us as students to be able to talk to parents and be able to give general advice. Overall a positive experience for all involved! University of Adelaide Students set up a booth at the uni and talked about all things communication. They also made some pretty fabulous stickers that they handed out to people who visited their booth! Department for Education, Berri Office – In addition to holding a morning tea to celebrate the week, senior

speech pathologist Alyce Ridgeway initiated ‘Book-Based Programming Implementation groups’ around different school partnerships/regions with a speech pathologist leading each group. They each chose a children’s picture book and planned book-based interventions targeting all discipline areas including print knowledge, phonological awareness, narrative, vocabulary, sentence grammar, emotional regulation, and engagement and are implementing intervention/activity lessons/sessions in classrooms and libraries across these areas. Additionally, they are facilitating some book-based staff planning and curriculum connecting sessions with educators in schools. They are also hoping to film sessions, connect and post to families through schools social media platforms and create book-based resource packs for the team to use in the future. Novita - This year, as part of our celebrations for Speech Pathology Week, the speech pathologists at Novita Elizabeth Office decided to educate the multidisciplinary team about our profession. The Speech Pathology Australia kit was used to decorate the office, and the $50 grant was spent on foods for our swallowing display, prizes, and providing a shared lunch for the team. Each day, we promoted different aspects of the profession that we at Novita often encounter — speech, swallowing, and Alternative and Augmentative Communication (AAC) — and provided some education to the team (we were able to educate our admin staff, too, who thought food and drink go down different pipes!). We held competitions, food experiments, and had a wonderful presentation by our speech pathology students from Flinders University. They presented on the relevant topic of modelling and recasting and provided a colourful handout for reference. We hope

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Speak Out | October 2021