Decorating the Tree

Are you looking for some ideas that incorporates movement into your sessions?  This is great activity to work on following directions, labeling, and prepositions.  This works well if you co-teach with the OT, which I share a room with OT and PT. The sentences that the kids generated using prepositions and vocabulary related to the Holidays were great!

Annual Door Decorating Contest

It's that time of year again... the annual door decorating contest.  I do not know about you, but coming up with ideas for my door stresses me out!! December, in general, stressing me out!  However, I found this cute idea on Pinterest, I just modified it a bit.  The kids loved drawing pictures of books we have read together.  Our door did not win, but we still had fun!

October Staff/Parent Newsletter

October's newsletter continues to focus on books that I love to use during this month.  I try to recommend at least 5 books for the month.  My top 3 choices for October are Apple Trouble by Ragnhild Scamll, The Little Old Lady Who Wasn't Afraid of Anything by Linda D. Williams, and The Chocolate Chip Ghost by Meighan Peifer.  I love the book Apple Trouble because the main character is a hedgehog!  Who doesn't think hedgehogs are cute? Am I right!  I also love this book because my daughter has a stuffed hedgehog that I "borrowed" from her room...shhhh... don't tell her! We used this book in therapy along with pictures of the items that got stuck to hedgehog.  I just printed some pictures I found on google and laminated them.  Then I used double sided tape so that each item that got stuck to the hedgehog could be placed on my stuffed hedgehog.  The kids loved it!  Any time you can bring a stuffed animal to class and use it during therapy is a win!

Another great resource that I just found is a website called Tarheel reader.  This is an awesome site where you can create your own stories for your students. It's simple and fun - you can create any story you want including social stories, sensory stories, and stories about field trips.  The stories can be viewed as a whole class using a smart-board or laptop, or you can print them for smaller group projects. I have already received a positive response from the music teacher!. Yup, that's right...the music teacher loved it!

October Staff/Parent Newsletter

October's newsletter continues to focus on books that I love to use during this month.  I try to recommend at least 5 books for the month.  My top 3 choices for October are Apple Trouble by Ragnhild Scamll, The Little Old Lady Who Wasn't Afraid of Anything by Linda D. Williams, and The Chocolate Chip Ghost by Meighan Peifer.  I love the book Apple Trouble because the main character is a hedgehog!  Who doesn't think hedgehogs are cute? Am I right!  I also love this book because my daughter has a stuffed hedgehog that I "borrowed" from her room...shhhh... don't tell her! We used this book in therapy along with pictures of the items that got stuck to hedgehog.  I just printed some pictures I found on google and laminated them.  Then I used double sided tape so that each item that got stuck to the hedgehog could be placed on my stuffed hedgehog.  The kids loved it!  Any time you can bring a stuffed animal to class and use it during therapy is a win!
Another great resource that I just found is a website called Tarheel reader.  This is an awesome site where you can create your own stories for your students. It's simple and fun - you can create any story you want including social stories, sensory stories, and stories about field trips.  The stories can be viewed as a whole class using a smart-board or laptop, or you can print them for smaller group projects. I have already received a positive response from the music teacher!. Yup, that's right...the music teacher loved it!

Grocery Store Flyer

Grocery store fliers can be used in therapy?!?!  How is it that I have never thought of this before? I have to give my hubby credit for coming up with this idea.  As he was skimming through the grocery flyer with our 2 year old daughter, narrating to her as we always do, a light bulb went off.  He said I should use fliers with my students.  Brilliant!  It's a great way to work on all kinds of speech and language skills, as well as academic skills.  For language, I like to use grocery fliers to sort foods into categories, such as fruits, vegetables, meats, etc. You can also sort food items into departments of the grocery store. For example, find all the foods found in the produce, grocery, frozen, meat, and dairy departments. Recipes are a great way to use for sequencing activities. Students can find items on the flyer that corresponds to a recipe. They can also organize meals for the week and determine what needs to be bought for each day of the week. If you are working on /l/ sound, have students name items, such as lemon, limes, lettuce, lamp chops, lima beans, lollipops, legumes, etc.  For my math friends/teachers (sorry I'm lost when it comes to anything more than basic math skills), addition is another great way to use fliers when calculating how much money you have to spend and planning accordingly. The possibilities are endless!

September Staff/Parent Newsletter

Does your school have parent feedback goals and whole school learning indicators?  We have done this for a few years and each year I strive to communicate in new and exciting ways.  This school year I have decided to provide teachers and parents (of my students) with a monthly email newsletter outlining various strategies and resources to increase communication skills.  For my September email newsletter, I compiled a list of suggested activities parents and teachers can utilize with their child(ren) or students. I generated two separate emails, one for parents and one for teachers, each just slightly modified to adjust to recipients.  Included in both (parent and teacher) were suggested books for the month of September, YouTube "Born Learning PSA - The supermarket, and strategies for articulation.  My goal is to get the word out about how important reading is for a number of reasons, including improving focus and attention, imagination, and increasing vocabulary. I have also just discovered these great YouTube videos "Born Learning PSA" and I LOVE them. It demonstrates the importance of narrating to your child ALL the time as they are learning so much from listening to what you are doing.  What are you all doing for your school goals?  I hope this helped you a little bit.  I will be back next month to share my November newsletter suggestions.  Have a great school year!

What Can You Find At The Beach?

How many of you work during the summer?  This will be my 2nd year working during the summer after having a baby.  Last year, the teacher and I decided to use themes each week.  One theme we used was the beach.  This year, I decided to make my own activity that could be used with a variety of students.

There are 16 pages that target simple sentences.  

 An extension activity includes 16 pages that include an adjective, preposition, and location.

MBHSM

What are you all doing to get ready for BHSM?  Every year, I try to hand out some informational text to teachers.  Some years I'm more creative than others, depending on how crazy my year is going. This year I decided to use boardmaker pictures of lips and ears.  On the back side of each picture, I compiled a list of strategies that I found online (I can't remember the website).

 

Baby Animals

This week in Kindergarten, vocabulary instruction is focusing on baby animal names.  We are reading many stories on the various names given to baby animals, concentrating on 8 vocabulary words.  I'm including a couple matching activities, a sound puzzle, and finger puppets to address this goal.  Each activity (with the exception of the print out) comes from my daughter's room!  

Easter Home Kit

I know I am not alone when I say that this time of year is super chaotic!  To top if off, St. Patrick's Day and Easter are extremely too close.  I felt like my planning for both holidays has been rushed. With that said, I still wanted to squeeze in some time to put together a home Easter kit for my students.  I tried to include activities specific to each individual goal.  I stuffed pieces of paper in each egg that targeted different skills, such as following directions, articulation, synoyms, antonyms, vocabulary, and sentence formulation.  I also added a bunny to work on prepositions.  They all included fun, decorative pencils in a cute carrot pouch.  Anytime I can incorporate carryover while still engaging the students, makes me happy!  Happy Easter!

   

St. Patrick's Day

Are you looking for a quick and fun St. Patrick's Day activity?  This new freebie includes 4 pages of vocabulary words related to St. Patrick's Day and 2 blank pages that can be used to target articulation.

Dr. Seuss's Birthday

In celebration of Dr. Seuss's birthday, we are reading One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish.  I paired this book with a rhyming activity.  I used words found in the book and wrote them on colored construction paper.  Students picked cards from a pile and matched it to its rhyming pair.  To modify this activity, some students were given one fish word and two choices (one that rhymed and one that did not).

Tying in Conjunctions

Are you looking for fresh new ideas to target conjunctions into your therapy sessions?  Check out my new activity that incorporates coordinating and subordinating conjunctions into sentences.  My students enjoyed using their "tie" to combine sentences.

Valentine's Day

One of my favorite times of the year has come...Valentine's Day! I relish in the opportunity to express how much my loved ones mean to me and Valentine's Day is no different!  A few times a year I allow my students to work on crafts and playdoh.  I mean who doesn't love playdoh?! This year our V-Day cards came out so cute (the one shown is from my daughter to her Dado).  In the center is a heart that says, "I love you because..." and the surrounding flaps describes the many reasons why they are loved so much.  Then, we made playdoh "cookies" just because it's so fun to squish and squeeze.

It's Raining Cats and Dogs, An Idiom Activity

Idioms can be challenging for many students, why not make it fun and engaging! Students can either color in the rainbow or draw lines to match the idiomatic phrase to its meaning.  Some of my older students opted to color!  Coloring is fun for all ages!  However, they also had to write sentences using the idiomatic phrase.

School Climate Commitee

Are you on a committee at school?  At my school, I participate in the School Climate Committee (aka The Sunshine Fund).  We are responsible for facilitating celebrations, as well as sending condolences.  We strive to let each staff member know that they are a valued member in our school.  This year, I decided to implement a staff year book.  The goal is to "catch" our staff in a memorable moment, thus creating a keepsake that will last for years.

This week in speech we are reading The Mitten, one of my favorite folktales.  After reading the story, we talked about the characters, setting and vocabulary.  I made a giant mitten out of brown paper and had the students place pictures in the appropriate category.  After finding the words in the book, students practiced creating sentences with vocabulary words.

 Are you looking for activities to use in RTI groups?  This activity contains 60+ pages specific to early developing speech sounds in the intial and final positions of words. Each slide contains 3 parts:  say it, circle it, and write it.