2. Speech and Language Common Core Cans by Nicole Allison of Speech Peeps. I love the idea of exit questions. Great thing to do in the last few minutes of a session.
3. Conversation System: Visual Guide and Scoreboard by Kate Shepard. I am always on the lookout for activities that will help my social language kids. Rubrics have been awesome for some of my students that have the fundamental skills and are working on carryover, but for those that are still working on those fundamental skills, I am excited to try something more visual.
I also have some clip art that I am excited for, but hopefully that will appear at a later time when I actually have time to make some new products!
In the meantime, check out Speech Room News, who is hosting another What's in Your Cart linky party to see what your other favorite bloggers have in their carts!
When I was in graduate school, we had two Rubbermaids filled with beans. I had one client who LOVED them, and we used it weekly in some fashion.
I was at the dollar store this weekend, and had the sudden inspiration to make one for my students. The card games have been fun, but some of my students have a hard time staying engaged for another card game.
I knew this week would be a perfect debut for something different. My students had a four day weekend, it's the coldest it's been in two years, and we can't do outdoor recess due to the cold
.
I obviously do a better job of hiding them in real life! :)
My first group is fourth graders, working on language goals, including vocabulary. I pulled out Live Love Speech's Snowy Synonyms, and pre-matched them in sets of 6. Each student had 1 minute to find all six words in the beans and figure out the synonym pairs. This particular group isn't made of strong readers, so it took some time for them to decode the words. Overall, it was a pretty tricky challenge for them. But boy, did they love it.
Thanks to Jenna at Speech Room News, I had a great countdown timer that added to the suspense.
My next group was a group of 5th graders who all work on /s/. I buried 20 words to start, which were part of artic bingo games that were left to me by the SLP who retired a few years ago. Each student had 1 minute to find & say as many of the words as they could. Challenge accepted! After the first round, they had another chance to beat their own score, and I added a few more cards. My record for the group was 23. They loved it! Up next were another artic group of 3rd graders with different sounds. Thanks to my Bingo cards, switching out the target sounds was easy. While I was resetting, those that were working on phrases or sentences had to choose some of the words they found to use in a sentence.
My fifth grader was my victory, though. He has more than one goal area. When we usually try to work on straight up articulation, he uses a monotone voice, and tells me, "I have to be bored to work on my sounds. So I'll be bored now." Um, not what you want to hear. We started with 24 cards buried. On his first round, he got 9. When he heard the record for the day was 23, he bucked up. His second attempt got 16 productions. Then 20, then 21, and then, finally, he got all 24. That's 90 productions of the target sound when getting 10 productions most days is pulling teeth!
Needless to say, I was feeling pretty good, and it wasn't even 10AM. Easy, cheap, and flexible? That's a therapy material I can get behind!
Here's how to make your own bucket:
1 Rubbermaid container, shoebox size or larger (I got mine at the Dollar Tree)
A total of about 6-8 lbs of dried beans, noodles, split peas and/or rice
Because it's flu season, I do have all my students use Purell before dipping their hands in the beans. I also make them promise to not spill beans all over the place if they want to be able to keep using it. So far, they have been pretty good about it.
I can't wait to find more ways to use my bucket in speech!
My husband and I have some friends that we've known since college, and we get together with about once a month. Usually, they come visit for a weekend, and we pretty much spend the weekend playing board games. Yep, a full weekend of board games, party games, and card games. I'm talking about Risk, Scattegories, and less well known games like Dominion, Pandemic, and Ticket to Ride.
You can imagine that holidays are a chance to give and get new games for our group. Most games aren't appropriate for therapy, or would take WAY too long to setup/play during a school therapy session.
So, imagine how excited I was when a game that we bought for my friends turned out to be a perfect game for SLPs.
The game is terribly simple. The deck is a series of double sided labeled photographs (are we not excited, SLPs?). Each player gets a certain number of cards, and place 5 out, either side up. Two cards get placed in the middle of the table, and players attempt to unload the cards from their smaller decks onto the middle decks by using COMPLETE SENTENCES to explain how the card from the middle and the card they are playing are related.
So, I might say the Airplane and the Stove (from my hand) are both made of metal. And someone else might say that they cook with the frying pan on the stove for the next card/point.
Here's a video to help make my point:
It's a pretty fast-paced game, and probably took us less than 3 minutes for 3 players. But of course, I would imagine it to take a bit longer with students.
I really like that the cards are photographs and labeled. Imagine other uses:
- Category naming
-Sentence building
-Labeling
-Describing (a la Headbanz)
Have you used Pickles to Penguins in therapy or a game that is similar?
*For the record, I am getting nothing for this post. I just happened to think it was a neato game that will now be on my wish list.
Do you ever feel like you need a quick drill for data collection? Just something you can pull out and use for a kid when you start teaching a structure/part of speech, and then use again later to see if it stuck? I have a lot of early elementary school kids with grammar goals on their IEP or kids that I see for interventions to offer a bit more support with a specific error they might make. So I created these drill cards for taking baseline data and progress monitoring. I also like to use them after break to document any regression in skills (we have to document a lot in order for a student to qualify for extended school year). I usually give 10 cards at a time, and change the ones I give each time. It allows me to make sure that they aren't memorizing the sentences.
There are 15 drill cards for each of the following areas:
Do/Does/Did
Is/Are
Was/Were
She/her
He/him
They/them
Irregular
plurals
Irregular
verbs
I've also included corresponding CCSS goals for grades 1-3. Some of the pronoun stuff is earlier, I understand, but this just gives an idea of the CCSS expectations of things like irregular plurals or verbs.
Take a peek at some of the examples, and if you want to pick it up, you can find it at my TpT site.
I keep each set in a ziploc bag with the type of deck it is on top. Easy to grab, quick to use, and they can be used year round.Works for me!
