Appy Hour Friday

Just wanted to give you all a head's up that Super Duper has permanently changed their app price from $5.99 to $1.99.  That's a 67% discount PERMANENTLY! How great is that?!?!

Check back next Wednesday for my weekly "Appy Hour"-Super Duper edition.

Appy Friday!

End Of The Week SLP Blues-Pirate Edition

There are so many cute activities that are pirate themed.  I wanted to compile a list of activities that you all can use to cure your "End of the Week SLP Blues". 

Really cute cards with vocalic /r/ target words. 

                                     

Check out this super cute paper plate craft you can make.  When I make it I am going to staple two plates together and cut a hole where the mouth is.  You could use it as an articulation game by putting words in the pirates mouth, and then your students pull out the card and say, "The pirate said ____."

 

I made this treasure map with some of my students that are working on articulation.  I have a pre-school kiddo that loves pirates so we ignored the fact that all the words are supposed to have "ar" in it and used the sound he was targeting. 

I have. Who has? game targeting synonyms

Pirate Proper Nouns Activity

This would be a cute activity for pre-schoolers.  You could even hide items like these in the sand and have the kids find the items with their target sound.

This is a cute behavior management bulletin board."Don't Walk The Plank!"....pretty sure my kids would behave badly just so they could walk the plank!

Here are some other blogs with lots of speech and language ideas related to pirates:

-Cindy Meester's blog has some fantastic bulletin board ideas as well as all kinds of apps to use during your pirate themed therapy. 

-Go to Speech Time Fun for some pirate fun!

-Speech Room News is capturing the pirates! Check out her preschool pirate activity too.

-I already featured this activity in a previous post, but it's so cute that here it is again.  Thanks Let's Talk Speech-Language Pathology!

-If you're going for a boat/pirate theme then be sure to check out my transportation post here.

*Click on the picture to get to the original blog post.

Don't forget to follow these blogs and/or like them on Facebook!

Check back next week for End of the Week SLP Blues-Summer Vacation Edition (wohoo!)

Appy Hour

Get Across-Free

This app is awesome for working on prepositional phrases. 

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I Hear Ewe-Free

I used this app with my 3 year olds that are non-verbal and have limited mobility.  I plopped their little hand on the screen and it made a noise.  Lots of laughs (and animal sounds) occurred during the trial of this app. 

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Sentence Magic-Free

For this app I turned the sound off and had the children organize 3-word phrases so that they made sense.

This app also provides an opportunity to work on regular and irregular past tense verbs.  I used this with several kids that I'm trying to expand their mean length of utterance. This app is so simple, but way more fun then when I just put notecards out on the table and make kids organize them into a sentence! 

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All About Sounds Lite-Free

In the Lite version they have phonemes /b/, "ch", /d/, "dz" and /f/ in the initial position of words. It's a matching game and offers a lot of opportunities for practice.  The child can label the item when the card turns over.  I mean I get desperate to get as many practice opportunities as I can in a session, and this one does all the work for me.  I would definitely consider buying the full version of this app. 

Happy "Appy Hour"!

Organization

As I'm beginning to put all my materials in boxes for my impending move, I've had a lot to contemplate. 

1. How did I accumulate so much stuff in just 2 years?
2. What should I take, donate and trash?
3. For the stuff I keep, what's the best way to keep it organized?

I'm not sure if any of you are doing spring cleanings of your classroom, but I thought I would give you some insight as to how I'm organizing my materials and what I've found works best for me. 

Book Themes:
As you all know from reading this blog, I love to theme ideas off of books.  I can't stand plain manila folders, because things fall out of them so easily and it's not nice and pretty the way I like it.  So, I like to print a picture of the book cover and laminate a manila envelope (just be careful when you are slicing the opening in the back because you can really mess up your finger...not that I have any personal experience with that or anything cough, cough)

This way all of it stays in there and you can store it any way you want without things falling out all over your classroom or file drawers.  Sometimes if the book is small enough I'll put it in the envelope too so all I have to do is grab the envelope and I'm all set. 

If you have too many items, or over sized items that won't fit in the envelope, I love these cardboard magazine holders from Ikea. 

Check out this previous post I had on where to find these cute labels that I adorn my entire classroom with. 

For more general materials (pragmatics, syntax, fluency etc) I am currently using these file boxes from Walmart. 

The only reason I prefer these to metal filing cabinets is that they move around easily.  I can bring the whole thing to the therapy table and not have to leave the table to go searching through filing cabinets. Don't get me wrong metal filing cabinets are essential in my room for keeping my student's files safe and secure, but for therapy materials, I need convenience. 

This is how I store my books with printable handouts.  And yes, I color coordinate my binders (you better believe my clothes are color coordinated in my closet too!). 

Here is the game closet.  I like to organize it by games that I usually use with my kids working on language and kids working on articulation.  Obviously, that does not limit these games to just those categories.  I can pretty much use any one of these games for any goal  on my caseload.  Usually this closet is a little more disorganized, but lucky for you I started packing parts of my classroom already so a lot of the games that aren't super popular were shoved in a box.

As far as throwing things away, I find myself to be a hoarder of craft materials (note that you do not and probably will not ever see my classroom craft closet).  However, I just can't talk myself into moving recycled goods because I "might" use it for a craft one day.  Please tell me you all are craft hoarders too. 

I would take a picture of my desk to show you, but it has been piled high with papers for about 4 months now.  I occasionally look through it to make sure I'm not missing something, but I have a feeling it will be there for the next 17 days that are left in the school year.  Maybe I should look through it before I move it to another state with me... 

So as you can see, some parts of my classroom are highly organized to the point of obsessive, while others not so much.  If you need some other ideas on how to organize/decorate your classroom, check out how my current classroom is decorated in this post. 

I'd love any ideas that you have for organization and/or packing up a classroom.  Email me or leave a comment below. 

Just keep packing, just keep packing, packing, packing, packing, packing.

Hidden Picture Scenes Review-Super Duper Publications

I was real excited when Carrie over at Super Duper Publications asked me to review a product.  Let's just say I frequent the Super Duper website and all of my school budget goes to them. 

I don't know about you all, but I have been having trouble entertaining my older articulation and language kids.  They are pretty sick of the games and activities that I have, and their brains are already on summer vacation.  So I was really excited to open up the Super Duper box and trial Hidden Picture Scenes. 

This activity includes 80 pictures scenes that contain S, R, L and S/R/L blends, a printable CD and 4 wet-erase markers. 

The picture scenes look like this.

Each picture scene includes 6 vocabulary words at the bottom, a vocabulary dense picture and a silly sentence that has targeted sounds underlined for carryover practice. 

Here is how I used it:

Articulation:
Before I let the kids loose with the markers and the picture scenes, we went over the words on the bottom.  Some of the words are a little obscure, and so the kids were having trouble figuring out what they were and/or how to sound the words out.  Then I let the kids find all the objects on the page by circling them with the markers provided.  When they find a word they say "I found the _____." (hello sentence level).  Once they found all the words then we read the sentence provided.  After we read the sentence I gave the kids an opportunity to create their own silly sentences that include the words provided.  This allowed for a lot of practice of their sounds and definitely helped jazz speech therapy up a bit. 

Language:
Expressive: The process was somewhat similar to the method above, but instead of targeting the sounds we talked about the meaning of the words.  If it was a word that was harder to define, then we thought of attributes.  After we defined/described all the words then they were allowed to go on a hunt for the pictures within the scenes.  When they found a picture they would have to tell me where they found it,  "I found the car next to the flag pole." This is a great opportunity to expand those utterances as well.  If applicable you could talk about the function of the words given. 

Receptive: Make sure to go over all the vocabulary words at the bottom first, and then give them directions, "Point to the car and then the robot.", "Point to the rat after you point to the rooster."

Fluency:
We went over all the words and then said the silly sentence using different types of disfluencies.  The child had to identify which disfluency I used and vice versa.  Then the child had to use their strategies to describe what was going on in the picture. 

Pragmatics:
Talk about what makes the picture silly and how one would change the picture to make it socially appropriate. 

Something really important for me when buying materials (especially with the limited funds that we get in the schools) is that the activity is adaptable and can be used with a variety of children on my caseload.  As you can see this game can target a number of goals, so I would call it a winner in my book.  A really great feature of this activity is also that it comes with a printable CD.  These are great for sending home with kids for homework.

Hope you all enjoyed this review.  If you like it make sure to comment below.  I'd love to hear your feedback!



*Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this post are Speech Lady Liz's.  The companies are nice enough to provide materials to try out, but provide no other compensation.

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