Pre-School Language Take-Home Program

I almost forgot to give you all this pre-school language take-home program. 

Sheesh it's like I'm stressed out and can't function or something....weird.

Click here to download.

End Of The Week SLP Blues-Summer Edition

End of the week SLP blues is an understatement for me this week....we're talking complete and utter loss of brain power.  Raise your hand if you feel the same way....oh all of you? Ya, okay well luckily I had just enough brain power to come up with this blog post. 

Hope it helps you get through the rest of the week!

This blog has this craft as a countdown to the end of summer, but I think we can take it further.  Pick 3 colors of paper for the links.  One color is for asking questions, one color is for commenting, and one color is for off-topic comments.  Each student gets a chance to tell the group what they are doing for summer break.  Then the links go on according to how the group participates.  Make sure to tell the students beforehand that you want the links to vary in color (but not have any off-topic links) and you want as many links as you can get!

This is a fun activity to do with your students with expressive language goals.  There are some good opportunities to talk about comparitives and superlatives. 

I like the idea of having kids come up with a sentence using the summer words in this booklet. Great vocabulary builder as well.

-Summer Mad Lib

-Speech Room News has pronoun ice cream cones

-Speech Time Fun has an ice cream parts of speech activity.

My room is officially all packed up, so I was scrambling this morning for something to do with a pre-schooler.  So, we made a watermelon.

We glued her target words onto each of the seeds and practiced them as we glued. 

I've got 2 more days of therapy and then sweet, sweet summer!   

Appy Hour-Super Duper Edition

Listening for Absurdities

In this Fun Deck there are pictures of people doing things that don't make sense, like pouring cereal into a pot or washing dishes in milk.  I used this app in a couple different ways.  I have several kids that have some major auditory processing issues, so I turned the sound up high and hid the picture from them.  They listened to the sentence and then had to decide which part of what they heard was absurd (by the way absurd became the favorite word of the session after they figured out it meant "weird".).  Then I showed them the picture and they got to hit the green button if they were right and the red one if they were wrong. I also used it with some of my kids that are working on grammar.  I turned the sound off this time and they had to look at the picture and decide how to describe it to me.  Then we turned the sound on and they listened to what the app said.  If they were right or at least close enough that it made sense, they got to press the green button.  This is also a great app to use with your kids that are on the spectrum.  There is a picture of a girl walking a fish bowl and one of my students said that the absurd part of the picture was that the girl was wearing really tall shoes. Ya....after I hit my head on the table a couple times we had to go over each part of the picture and then he finally got it.   

"What's Being Said?"

In this app there are pictures of people doing different things and blank conversation bubbles over them.  The idea is to figure out what the person/people might be saying to each other.  This app is good for kids that are working on expanding utterances, grammar etc.  I also used it with a fluency group and had the kids exhibit different types of stutters and/or use their strategies while describing what the person would be saying.  This is a really great app if you have any kids that have an answering "why" questions goal.  I asked my students to determine what the character was going to say, and then I asked them, "Why?".  This was a lot more difficult, so I was able to teach some of those more critical thinking skills.  A feature of this app (and other Super Duper apps) that I really like is that you can decide which pictures to use and weed out the others.  I had a group of kids that are working on pragmatics, so I only picked the cards that had multiple people in them.  Then I came up with what the two characters were saying.  The group had to decide if they would have "good" thoughts or "weird" thoughts if someone said that to them.  If it was "weird" thoughts then they had to fix what the character said. 

60 Story Starters
This app has pictures and then gives you a story starter.  My students working on language had a lot of trouble with this app.  They weren't quite sure where to go with the story starter.  Well what a perfect opportunity to work on story telling?!  I had to start them out with an example and then we talked about transition words.  Some of the story starters I wasn't a huge fan of, just because they were difficult to expand on.  That being said, it was really easy to come up with your own.  I also turned the sound off and the kids came up with their own story starters.  I not only used this with my students working on language, but I used it for carryover practice with my kids working on articulation.  How many times have you attempted to get conversation going so you could get a language sample? This is your app. 


Not sure if you saw my previous post, but Super Duper is permaneantly selling their apps for $1.99.  I think it's pretty awesome that Super Duper actually listened to their customers and lowered the costs so they would be more affordable.  I for one am very thankful!




*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. 

Summer Take-Home Program

June Articulation

June Language

July Articulation

July Language

August Articulation

August Language

Tricks Of The Trade

There are a lot of tricks and techniques that we SLPs don't learn in grad school.  I have learned so much from working closely with general education teachers.  They have inspired many of my ideas and a lot of their activities can be translated to speech and language therapy easily.  One thing that I love to do when introducing a theme or when I'm trying to follow the general ed curriculum in my room is to use KWL posters.


Knows-Wants to Know-Learned

This idea is great for teaching vocabulary and concepts.  The first day we discuss the topic and fill in the "K".  What do we already know about the topic at hand? Then we talk about the "W".  What do we want to know about the topic? This is an excellent opportunity to work on sentence structure when asking questions.  I like the kids to come up with a variety of Wh- questions.  After we fill in these two columns, we get to researching.  The research is usually reading a story that is about the topic and doing activities that create conversation about the topic.  At the end of the week we fill out the "L".  What did we learn?  Did we get any of our questions answered? As easy as that you've just targeted your kids goals of using descriptive words, asking questions and answering questions.  The chart doesn't have to be anything fancy either.  The picture above is a dry erase board and I took a dinosaur and sat him on top of the chart. 

Or change it up even more and do a Has-Can-Likes. Here is one I did for penguins. I used a sentence building sheet that included, "A penguin has______.", "A penguin can _______." and "A penguin likes ______." This is an easy way to expand length and complexity of utterances.

If you wanted to get crazy you could even complete a KWL poster and a Can-Have-Like, but that's only if you're feeling like the wild SLP that I know all of you are deep down. :)