Planes, Trains and Automobiles

....well boats too.   

Boats

Boat Vocab

Row, Row, Row Your Boat
A fun activity is to come up with new verses for this song that have to do with other modes of transportation. (i.e. drive, drive, drive your car or fly, fly, fly your plane) This is a good opportunity to work on rhyming also.

(My friends think it's weird that I collect trash and used containers. 
You all get it, right?!?)

Set out a bunch of materials styrofoam plates, cups, papertowel rolls, paper, plastic silverware, microwave containers etc. and have the children create a sailboat. When they are done have them explain how they made their boat. You can either try and recreate based on what they tell you, or take pictures as you go and other children can sequence it at a later therapy session.

Make your own articulation sailboat.  Take strong tape (packing or book tape) and tape 5-10 popsicle sticks together.  Before you tape write target words on each stick.  Leave a little space between the two in the middle so you can stick a pipe cleaner in there to have a sail.  Glue or tape this sail to the pipe cleaner.  (Warning: One of my students wanted to know if it would float, it does for about 30 seconds and then it sinks....fast.)

Cut sailboats out of felt (or paper) and give your students directions to put the pieces on a felt/chalk board.  Put the big, yellow triangle sail on the small purple boat etc. 

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Bus

Bus template

Bus vocabulary

Use the template and the vocabulary and make a bus for the kids to take home. I printed mine on yellow paper and then included these labels. 

I like to read this book with my kids. 
Obviously, "Wheels On The Bus" is sung many times while we discuss this topic.

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Cars

One of my favorite games to play with my kids working on /k/, /g/ and/or s-blends is "Red light, green light." Lots of good practice saying "red light stop, green light go".

I got this city rug from IKEA for super cheap and the kids love to take cars and go around the roads.  This is a great opportunity to just "play" with the kids and talk about where they are driving there cars, what they are in front of, next to, behind, on top of etc.  It's great for following directions, put the fire truck on the volcano.  This particular rug has all sorts of locations and you can talk about words that describe each place (the igloo is cold and wet).  This rug is the big reinforcer when I'm meeting my little bits (especially boys) for the first time.  I can usually get a very in-depth language sample from kids with just a couple of cars and this rug. 

I use this stop light for a lot of things.  I use it for behavior management and I also use it for CVC words.  I recently have used it with a kid that uses the phonological process of final consonant deletion.  I put velcroed letters on each part of the stoplight to make a simple CVC word, and then if they get all the sounds green means "Go!" and they get to race cars or whatever their reward is for that day. 

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Planes

Most of the students I work with have never been on a plane, so it's hard to explain it to them.  So instead we take this time to pack our suitcase.  You could get crazy and bring a real suitcase in with clothes, but I tend to go the easier route so I don't have an excuse to hoard more clothes in my closet than I already do. 

Use a plastic travel soap container from the $1 store (These have so many uses in the speech room;  card game containers, crayon containers etc.).  I use the outfits from the Jesse Bear activity that I posted here.  The kids pick where they want to go (hello negotiating) and then we look up the weather there.  We talk about what kinds of things there are to do in that city and then we pack our bags accordingly.

I snatched this book off the free pile at school and the kids love it! It goes through and explains what each type of aircraft looks like and its purpose. 

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Trains

Trains are another great thing to make out of old scraps.  Use paper towel rolls as the wheels and cotton balls as the smoke. 

Use train cars to work on blends, final consonant deletion, initial consonant deletion and for kids who use the phonological process of cluster reduction.  For this, I like to use the legos that have wheels and hook together to make a train.  I will put a magnetic letter on each of the train cars and we talk about each sound separately.  Then we link them all together and say the word with all the sounds.

This would also be a good opportunity to talk about occupations and word associations in the transportation industry. Here is a matching game. 

Sorry for the lack of theme posts lately.  This speech lady's head has been barely above water(hence the boat being the first topic)...thinking that will be a theme until I make my big move up north!