End Of The Week SLP Blues- Pre-school Language Edition

So my new job here in Chicago is at a speech and language pre-school.  So far it's been crazy busy, but I'm realizing everyday that it's a really great fit for me.  I've always loved working with the little guys and if you can imagine I actually have time built in my schedule for lesson planning (I know, right?!?) Needless to say the lesson planning block is one of the major highlights of my day.  I feel like I can really contribute some great ideas during that time.  I was perusing Pinterest the other day and saw some really fun activities that I'd love to incorporate into some of my classes.  Here are some ideas that I've been anxious to make.

Take different fabrics, products, household items and make a sensory board.  I think it would be really fun to do one for every season.  Have items that you use during each time of year and create a picture out of them.  Winter could have parts of mittens, socks, something shiny.  Then you're targeting lots of language that they might hear throughout the season. 

I've set up some major race tracks in my day, but I want a giant cardboard tube so bad now.  Click on the link to read the ideas behind this tube.

 

Another great activity that you could incorporate into any theme.  Place items that target the vocabulary you are trying to elicit in a bottle and add sand, beans, rice etc.  The children can shake the bottles and label all the items. It would be fun if you had a song to go with your theme because the bottles would double as shakers. 

Create functional play scenarios with a cardboard box.  If you can't afford to buy the plastic versions of grocery stores or kitchens, use a refrigerator box or something large enough for your idea and create your own.  Have the kids help you make it (think how much language would be happening!).  Recently, our school went on a field trip to the nature museum.  In our social language class we had the students create a nature museum out of a cardboard box.  They found animals around the room and used markers to create windows and exhibits that they had seen.  Such a fun activity!

I just thought this was a cute craft project.  You could have a camping theme and the kids could make s'mores and pretend to sit around the campfire and tell stories or sing songs.  Also, this justifies my hoarding of toilet paper/paper towel rolls. 

So, I feel like I must apologize for my lack of posting. I'm sure all of you know how stressful it is to start a new job, and I come home and am completely exhausted.  So while I may have been having some happy hours, the "Appy Hour" was too much for me to wrap my brain around.  I will get those rolling again here soon.  Thanks for understanding and I'm excited to get really settled- in, in the next couple months and create tons of ideas for you all.  The population I work with has decreased in age, but I'll try to make sure to incorporate activities for older elementary when I can.  On that note, if you all ever have any requests for activities leave a comment and I will try my best to incorporate that idea into a post.  Also, I know you all out there have some great ideas.  Send them to me because I would love, love, love to see them and possibly put them up on the site.

Behavior Management

Stop Light

This may look familiar.  I talked about using this in my transportation post for final consonant deletion.  I love multi-purpose therapy tools! I use this for a visual reminder for my students (mostly my preschool and kindergarten kids).  I print out their names, add velcro and the goal is to stay on green the whole time.  If they move to yellow then they can still earn their way back up to green, but if they get on red that means no sticker and I report back to their teacher/parents.  Usually just getting on yellow puts them in check and they are ready to work after just that warning.  You can also use terms like green choices (good choices) or red choices (bad choices). 

Thought Pails

My friend Angela uses this with her groups and it does wonders.  Blue or Purple sticks means she's having "good" thoughts about the student.  Red or yellow sticks mean she's having "weird" thoughts about the student and they need to fix the issue.  These visual reminders really seem to help. 

Token Boards

I found this great resource along with many other visuals off elearning.autism.net.  Some kids need a constant visual reminder of what they are working towards.  These token boards are great with that.  I will often use them with my younger kids working on articulation that just don't have the attention to task that is required to complete the drill practice.  

Here is another great visual from Live Speak Love

I'm a big believer in positive reinforcement.  When I see a student sitting quietly and doing what they are asked to do I try and make sure I tell them, " I like that Johnny is sitting with his hands in his lap."   This usually encourages the other students to do what's being asked as well. 

What do you all do to promote making good choices? Leave a comment below so everyone can see!

Appy Hour-Super Duper Social Edition

Practicing Pragmatics Fun Deck

This app, like all Super Duper apps, allows you to pick and choose the cards that you want presented to your students.  There are 7 sub-categories in this pragmatics app.  They include Politeness, Solving Problems, Feelings, Giving Info, Requesting, Telephone Skills and Staying On Topic.  I used this directly with the Simply Social at School-7 that I reviewed yesterday.  Each of these sub-categories coincides perfectly with one of the 50 lessons in the book.  The app is great to use for generalization, group activities and/or as a reward.  I used the app to get a baseline.  I chose the category I was going to teach that week, the kids went through the cards and answered accordingly, I used the buttons on the app to keep track of whether or not they gave the right answer, and there you go baseline data.  I then spent the week teaching them the lessons and then at the end of the week we went through the same cards and again used the buttons on the app to decide which ones they got right and wrong and hello progress monitoring! What's great is that you can enter each of your students by name and then at the end email yourself or parents the data you obtained from the app.  This app is also great if you need to get conversation going to get a language sample, carry-over articulation skills into conversation or work on fluency. 

 

What Would You Do At School If... Fun Deck

I used this in a similar way as I did the Practicing Pragmatics Fun Deck.  I hand picked the cards that went along with the lesson that week took a baseline and then monitored progress at the end of the week.  What I like about this app is that all the What ifs....really do happen to these kids on a daily basis.  A lot of my students can decide what someone else should do in the situation, but when they themselves go through it they are unable to use those social thinking skills.  I like to do the ol' "Well Johnny I agree that's what the girl should do.  Has this situation ever happened to you?".  Most of the time I get a big "NO", but then when I remind them that in fact yesterday they did get in trouble in class for talking while the teacher was talking, they "sort of" remember then.   This is another excellent app for getting conversation going and even better getting group conversation going.  We talk about how everyone handles situations differently, but we have to remember our social thinking skills and make sure that we make the right decision.  This app would really work well with your older elementary students that may be transitioning to middle school.  You could even create your own "What ifs..." that apply personally to each student and they could draw the picture and take it home so parents can be aware of issues that may be happening at school.  

So, that is how I used these apps and integrated them into lessons using Social Skills at School-7.  

I hate to tell you all this, but for this "Appy Hour" I'm sitting on the beach in North Carolina.  Go ahead and be jealous!

Happy "Appy Hour"!

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. 

Simpy Social at School-7 Review

Super Duper sent me the Simply Social at School 7 book with CD-ROM to review. 

I have a lot of students who need direct teaching of social skills and not all of them are children with Autism.  A lot of my younger elementary students with severe language impairments also need to brush up on their pragmatics (the website says for grades 2-12, but I used it with a Kindergarten group and it worked great).  I was excited to try the lessons in this book out and see how they responded. 

Now I could write a review of all the parts of the book, or I could get to the nitty gritty and tell you exactly how I used it.  I know which one I would want, so this is how it was used in my classroom.

There are 50 social skills topics in this book.  Each topic has a set of 7 steps.  These steps are kind of like little mantras for your students i.e. "I will be aware of the people around me." etc.  I like to start off the week using a pocket chart and sentence strips.  We write down each of the 7 steps and talk about them as we go.  The book has a description of each step so you don't even have to use your brain to think of an explanation (love that)!  This pocket chart stays up in the classroom all week and the steps are reviewed each session.  After you go through all the steps you can move on to the next section of the lesson, the "Look and Learn". 
The "Look and Learn"  is where the CD-ROM comes in handy.  Print off enough sheets for each student and have them follow the directions to the picture scene.  In the detailed picture scenes the children are either following the 7 steps for that lesson or they are not.  It's up to the students to decide who is and who isn't.  This is a good group activity to get your students to participate.
The next section is the "Think and Review".  In this section there are scenarios that focus on the topic at hand.  These are nice for creating discussion groups. You can talk about what the student did and what they could do to make the situation better.  Lots of perspective taking is needed for the given scenarios.  At the end there are also discussion questions where the students can relate their own experiences to whatever the lesson is focusing on. 
The last part of each lesson is a "Take-Home Practice".  This is great to send home each week so parents know what the child is learning that week.  Each lesson also comes with a "Simply Social Superstar!" cut-out that they can either keep in a book or you could create an award wall in your classroom.  I waited until I saw the student using that particular skill we had been working on that week and then they got to color and take-home the award. 

What I really like about this book is that it can go hand-in-hand with other social skills programs that you might already have in place.  I use Michelle Garcia Winner's Social Thinking Curriculum, and this book coincides perfectly with the lessons and the Unthinkables of her program. 

Some examples of how I integrated the two are as follows:
Being Aware of Your Surroundings lesson- Body Snatcher/The Unwonderer
Ignoring Distractions lesson-Brain Eater
Staying On Topic lesson-One Sided Sid/Topic Twister Meister
Turn-Taking lesson-Destroyer of Fun

Because I already had this Social Thinking Curriculum in place, I wasn't sure how the book would work with everything.  It ended up really adding a lot.  I love the 7 steps for each lesson and those are really great to be able to give to parents each week so they can practice and understand what you are working on.  This book also does most of the lesson planning for you.  It has 50, that's right folks 50 lessons to use.  You could definitely turn each lesson into a week long activity.  There are 52 weeks in a year so there you go no social group planning for an entire year.  Those other 2 weeks (here, here).  Done. 

Check back tomorrow for "Appy Hour" to see how I integrated some Super Duper apps into the lessons from Simply Social 7. 

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.

Appy Hour- Speech With Milo Adjectives Review

Speech With Milo-Adjectives

Speech With Milo-Adjectives is a vocabulary building game that would be great to use with your pre-school kids and/or younger elementary students that have a language impairment. 

How it works:

First you choose the words that you want your student(s) to target.  The adjectives you can choose from range from easy (happy, sad) to more difficulty words like (wide, narrow).  Once you've chosen your words you touch "Go" and you are presented with great animated scenes that describe each word.  When using it with your younger kids you can leave the sound and written word on to teach each concept.  As they learn the new vocabulary you can choose to take the word or sound off and they have to determine what vocabulary word Milo is presenting.  You also have the option to put the word in a phrase. 

Alternative Uses:

There are a lot of antonyms in the vocabulary that you can use.  So now this adjective game is an antonym game.  Depending on the child's level I like to have them put the word in the sentence or act out the word themself. With one of my Kindergarten groups we had a "Milo" day and each student had an opportunity to be assigned an adjective from the app or one that I thought of.  Then we played charades and acted the words out and their classmates had to guess what word they were acting out. 

*Warning: The kids became super silly with this game so make sure to have some "calm down" time before you send them back to class. Their teachers will thank you! :)

Happy "Appy Hour"!

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.





Beginning of the Week SLP Blues-Father's Day Edition

Welp, I warned you all that I might drop the ball on posting regularly.  To make up for that here are some fun Father's Day activities to use with your students this week. 

Lay out scrap paper or pre-cut shapes for the tie.  The students can either ask for shapes and colors or they can follow directions you give to them on how to decorate it. 

You could do several things with this idea. You could have the kids create coupons for dad (i.e. I will help you wash the car.) or you can come up with words to describe their dad and if the word has their articulation sound in it then they put the card in the pocket. 

Great activity for vocabulary development.  The kids think of all the words that describe their dad and then see if they can arrange them so it spells out father.

This is a cute question and answer game to use with your students.

Cute activity for building vocabulary.

* Click on pictures to get to site links.

Check out my Mother's Day post for some other ideas that you could turn into a Father's Day activity. 

I couldn't post about Father's Day without saying something about my dad.  I may be biased, but I'm pretty sure I have the best dad out there.  He has been supportive with every decision I've made in my life and is there cheering me on every step of the way.  Lately it's been my turn to cheer him on.  My dad is currently on a health and fitness journey and I couldn't be more proud of him.  I can't imagine life without him and am thankful he's motivated to stay around for a long time to come.  I love you Pops and can't wait to celebrate Father's Day with you at the beach!

Happy Father's Day!

Lakeshore Photo Contest

Lakeshore is currently holding a photo contest.  It's called the Summer Learning Facebook Photo Promotion. FIVE lucky winners will receive a $1,000 Lakeshore e-gift card! They're asking fans to submit a photo of their child participating in their favorite summer learning activity – from nature walks to museum visits to everything in between. The top 5 photos with the most “likes” win!

For more information on the contest, check out: www.lakeshorelearning.com/summerphotocontest 

Contest ends June 30th.

I'll be voting and will be snapping my own photos of my nieces and nephews participating in a learning activities. 

If you win make sure to check out my reviews of their products (here and here) for ideas on how to spend that $1,000!