Sunday, December 29, 2013

30+ Free Wintry Resources for Speech and Language Therapy

    We haven't seen a bit of snow in my part of Virginia this year. This is a peek of my neighbors' snowmen taken in 2011. 


My most popular posts in 2013 were my lists of links so here are more than 30 links to resources for winter.

If you are looking for something to do on those first few days back, check out these New Year's Day activities. 
  • We're Thinking About A New Year is FREE at Ladybug's Teacher Files. Work on this together in a small group to incorporate predicting, time/seasonal concepts, complex wh-questions, retelling, and more. 

There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of links to activities suitable for speech and language therapy that incorporate a winter theme. Here are just a few. 
  • A lot of work, but very cute Winter Dramatic Play at L. C., SLPBuild a snowman, ice skate, make some hot chocolate. 
  • Printable graphics and activities for The Mitten, The Hat, and The Three Snow Bears by Jan Brett can be found at janbrett.com
  • The First Grade Parade's Mitten Loads of Fun includes a very cute downloadable blend activity for students practicing /l/ blends.  She also created an adjective activity for beginning readers and an activity for making predictions. The math and writing activities could be used to ask questions and make comparisons. Use the Mitten Math word problems for articulation carry-over. 
  • A search for "winter" at TpT revealed 95 free activities for speech therapy. Topics included inferences, pronouns, articulation, sequencing and so much more. 
  • Print Make a Snowman Game at Activity Village. Students can practice saying their target phoneme the number of times on the die. Work as teams or individually. Change the rules to meet the needs of your students. 
  • Build a snowman and sing Ten Little Snowmen at Starfall.com.
Enjoy and stay warm!


Diana

© 2013

Sunday, December 1, 2013

Books to Read in December AND Links!

Disclaimer: This post contains Amazon affiliate links.


During the holidays, add one or more of these wonderful books to your therapy sessions. 

If You Take a Mouse to the Movies by Laura Numeroff is my favorite holiday book. Find many links to activities in two of my 2012 posts, Taking the Mouse to the Movies and Taking Mouse to the Movies: Why Questions, Pronouns, and more. 



Read Llama Llama Holiday Drama, by Anna Dewdney, on your computer or whiteboard at We Give Books.org. This book gives you a lot of opportunities to talk about action words, work on verb tense, and ask and answer questions. At Teachers pay Teachers, Llama Llama Holiday Drama Activities Free! includes an adjective search and comprehension questions. Find vocabulary and other language activities in the Llama Llama Activity Kit from Penguin Young Readers Group.






Cookies are always a good topic for December. Kizclub has story props for the book, Who Stole the Cookies from the Cookie Jar?, illustrated by Jane Manning and you can view the version by Christine Schneider at Vimeo. Find a rhyming activity at Cinjoella and, at YouTube, Kim Taylor-DiLeva explains how to use the rhyme with a group of students along with adding some sign language. 





Find story props for Bear Stays Up at 1+1+1=1 and a free sequencing activity for readers at Teachers Pay Teachers (Happily Ever After Education).  

OR, for a little less than a Grande Caffe Latte, you can purchase Bear Stays Up For Christmas: Speech and Language Activities by Jenn Alcorn of Crazy Speech World. Included in the 18 pages are activities for rhyming, synonyms, comprehension questions, wh questions, story retelling, and articulation word lists for /r/, /s/, and /l/. 

The other book companion by an SLP at Teachers pay Teachers is only a little more than that Grande Caffe Latte.  The 37 page Bear Stays Up For Christmas – Speech and Language Activities (Book Companion) by Mindy Stenger of The Speech Bucket targets sequencing, story retelling, comprehension, basic language concepts, following directions, written expression, and more.



The Easy Reader at Heidisongs.com is perfect for retelling, sequencing, syntax or to increase sentence length after reading Pete the Cat Saves Christmas. Use Parent Magazine's Christmas Addition with Pete the Cat and The Christmas Pup as carrier phrases for articulation practice. Addition facts are perfect for the phoneme /s/ and for practicing /l/blends - Seven plus one equals nine. Use the blank sheet to write your own facts and incorporate other phonemes. 



Find preschool activity suggestions for Snowballs by Lois Ehlert at Wannabwestern

Gingerbread Baby by Jan Brett is another favorite. Find another book companion at TpT by Mindy Stenger of The Speech Bucket. And, this one is free. Twelve pages of activities target sequencing, story retelling, comprehension, basic language concepts, early print awareness, and oral and written expression. 


Create a Gingerbread Baby House at JanBrett.com. All kinds of opportunities for speech and language production can occur as students give directions while one student creates the house.  Make several different houses, print, and use for barrier games. Practice articulation carry-over, basic positional words, syntax, turn taking, and more! 

Listen to Jan Brett read her story. Print masks from Jan Brett's site and students can wear them as they retell the story. Or, use them as story props.

I hope that these book suggestions and links save you a little time as you plan your December sessions. I will be taking a break from blogging this month and will be back in January!

Best wishes to you during this holiday season! 

Diana

© 2013

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Tuesday's Treasure Box: My Gingerbread House

This was my gingerbread house for several years of "after Thanksgiving lessons." 

Yes, it's tacky, but students in the early childhood classes loved it.

Simply add a door and windows to a folding display board, add Velcro strips, and invest in some dollar store holiday items. Many of my items were cast-offs. 

Pair with a book about a gingerbread house and teach the adjectives big, little, noisy, rough or bumpy, smooth, hard, and soft. Students chose a holiday decoration, used one or more adjectives to describe it, and then placed it on the board and told its location (next to Santa, over the window, etc). 

Introduce the adjectives by presenting objects (rock, cotton, sandpaper, and bells) with pictures. 

Enjoy!


Diana

© 2013

Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Tuesday's Treasure Box: 29 Free Forms and On-line Literacy Activities




I am posting two treasures today and know that you will love them!






Ricki Block, at Preschool Speechie, offers 29 free printable forms include language sample and MLU checklists, pacing boards, a homework note form, a question hierarchy, information about feeding and first words, games, activities, and so much more. Many forms are perfect to share with early childhood teachers and parents. Others can be used daily in therapy. Did I mention that that they were FREE? 

AND, she is currently offering, free for a limited time,  141 VC-CVC picture cards at her TpT Store. 





Literactive provides FREE on-line literacy materials for early readers. Most items are available for download, but you must be registered prior to downloading. 

Read along with animated nursery rhymes, poems, and guided reading books. Under Activities,  some target skills are rhyming, telling differences, matching sounds, and building simple sentences.  Look at Level 7 for activities targeting s, r, or l blends. 

Enjoy!

Diana

© 2013

Saturday, November 16, 2013

Pizza!

My early childhood classes usually had some lessons related to food and household items during November. Pizza was one topic that I often used as I really like the book, Hi, Pizza Man!, by Virginia Walter. Much language was elicited as the students used props to retell the story. 

Retell the story, Hi Pizza Man!, while using ideas from Flannel Friday: Hi, Pizza Man! found at 1234 More Storytimes' blog. 

Get some props; a telephone, toy or paper pizzas, and a hat for the pizza man.  Tell the students to call the pizza man to request a pizza. They can request sizes, toppings, etc. The group creates the pizza and the pizza man delivers. 

There are a lot of great pizza related activities online. And, many literature selections suitable for the pizza theme.

 
I like the FREE app,  Making Pizza - LAZ Reader [Level E–first grade] by Language Technologies, Inc. The pictures are wonderful and the book provides a lot of opportunities to talk about actions and ask questions. 

NYC Department of Education has an adapted PowerPoint Book, I Love Pizza, as well as, printable books made with Widget Symbols.

Find more than 25 FREE pizza themed books at Tar Heel Reader.org.

Activities to go with the book, The Little Red Hen Makes a Pizza, by Philemon Sturges and Amy Walrod can be found at Make Learning Fun.com. You will also find an emergent reader and pizza sequence cards.  

More sequence cards, How to Make Pizza, can be found at Kizclub.com.

Sing pizza songs to teach imitation of gestures, vocabulary, sentence structure, following directions and phonemic awareness. Find three cute songs at Storytime Katie

Request and answer questions while putting toppings on a pizza slice from Making Friends.com

At Boardmaker Achieve there are over 50 printable or interactive Boardmaker activities. Find recipes, storyboards for popular children's literature, sequence cards, a pizza restaurant choice board, and several good interactive pizza activities for your whiteboard. 

For those of you who like to cook, check out Play With Your Food: Pizza Fun Faces at Early Activities and Projects. Find more recipes at Preschool Express

Watch Sesame Street's Fat Blue orders from Speedy Pizza. Talking about this would be a good question and answer activity with some phonemic awareness and inferences thrown in! 

Video clips emphasizing the word pizza can be seen at Sesame Street.org. Use these for print awareness, phonemic awareness, and the phoneme /p/. Look for Ordering a Pizza, Pizza, and P: Pizza

Another phonemic awareness activity, Word World's Pigs Perfect Pizza, can be found at PBS Kids.org. 

Make pizza at Emily's Pizza Parlor by Inkless Tales.

Over 150 pizza activities at Teachers Pay Teachers are FREE. Pizza Scramble- A free Auditory Processing, Sequencing, and Memory Activity and It's a PIZZA were created by SLPs and cover sequencing, following directions, recalling sentences and more. 


Diana

© 2013

Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Tuesday's Treasure Box: Thanksgiving Matching Game, A FREE App



Thanksgiving 
Matching Game
Good Neighbor Press, Inc
Although Thanksgiving Matching Game was developed to reinforce visual discrimination skills, this would also be a great app for speech and language. As students tell about the differences, a variety of speech and language skill objectives can be targeted. 

Enjoy!

Diana

© 2013

Friday, November 8, 2013

Hey Diddle Diddle - What's in the Middle?

Hey Diddle Diddle - What's in the Middle? was a favorite of my students. The words are fun to say. Just squeeze a dog, cat, and cow together and ask the students to respond to the question Hey Diddle Diddle, what's in the middle? They answer the question, pull the animal out of the middle, and repeat and/or reverse roles. 

There is a lot that you can do with the rhyme, Hey Diddle Diddle. My students pretended to be the characters in the story and used the action words jumping, running, playing, and laughingRetelling, rhyming words, the phoneme /d/, and the concepts over and under are just a few of more of the skills that can be practiced. 

See the animated rhyme and play the games at Literactive and Inkless Tales. Also, look at the animated rhymes at Kids-Songs.TV (YouTube) and Playrific

There are a lot of good ideas and an emergent reader for this rhyme at Virtual Vine. 

Find story props at Kizclub.

Check out the way that Karen Cox, of PreKinders, uses her printable Hey Diddle Diddle Cards in her classroom. 

At DLTK, find crafts, word wall pictures, and an Itsy Bitsy Hey Diddle Diddle Book. 

Carl's Corner has printable books, a sequencing activity, a matching game, and a story cube. 

This pdf from the Charles A. Dana Center at The University of Texas at Austin, tells how to use the rhyme, Hey Diddle Diddle, to teach kindergarten students differences between nonliving objects and living organisms. 

I found an interactive book and some printables at Boardmaker Achieve

As of today, there were 146 Hey Diddle Diddle activities and posters found at Teachers pay Teachers. Six were free. 

Enjoy!

Diana

© 2013

Tuesday, November 5, 2013

Tuesday's Treasure Box: Between the Lions

Discover a wealth of resources at Between the Lions on PBS Kids. Games, stories, video clips, lesson ideas, and so much more. 

Look at Find It!, the index that sorts the activities by skill, subject, and curriculum.

Practice describing, talk about feelings, expand vocabulary, make sentences, and play phonological awareness games.

The video clips of songs such as Hung up on H, Get Your Mouth Moving, and Sloppy Pop can be used when teaching phonological awareness.
  
Play Synonym Sam's Lab, Hopposites, and sort categories while playing The Messy Attic.

Print a word wall and a variety of matching games.


My favorite part of the site is the Stories page where you will find animated Folktales and Fables such as Three More Little Pigs, Stone Soup, and The Little Red Hen

Enjoy!

Diana

© 2013

Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Tuesday's Treasure Box: Inkless Tales

Elizabeth Bushey is the creator of all games, poems, stories, and much more at Inkless Tales. Her stories, poems, and tongue twisters are perfect for articulation practice. 

I like Hey Diddle, Diddle. Click on each character to talk about actions and more. 

Download finger puppets for the plays, Little Red Riding Hood and Goldilocks and the Three Bears. 

Annie's Ice Cream Shop and Emily's Pizza Parlor are great therapy activities. 

Enjoy!

Diana

© 2013

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Tuesday's Treasure Box: Halloween Apps and Apptivities

There are many Halloween themed apps that can be used for a large number of speech and language objectives.  I don't need to tell you about them as many other SLPs have done a great job on their blogs. AND, a few even created Apptivities - activities to use with the apps. 

Check out the list below to find FREE and budget priced apps along with FREE advice as to how to use them. 

Last year, Jeremy Legaspi, told us about 16 Halloween apps and how to use them in therapy on his post,  Appdapted: Halloween Themed Apps, at ASHAsphere.

SPEECH2U posted some of her favorite Halloween apps along with suggestions as to how they can be used at A gazillion Ghoulish Games and Apps. And, her 2012 post, Halloween Masks, tells how she uses the app, Mask Mania and other masks or head gear with a variety of speech and language skills. 

At Technology and Speech Therapy Corner, Heather Strebel, posted a FREE printable barrier game activity to be used with the app Monster Mash Lite


Enjoy!

Diana


© 2013

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Halloween is Just Two Weeks Away and the Pumpkin is Stuck on the Vine: Speech and Language Activities for Big Pumpkin by Erica Silverman

My favorite book for Halloween is Big Pumpkin written by Erica Silverman and illustrated by S. D. Schindler. I read this book many times at the request of my own children in the 1990s and am pleased that it is still readily available. 

My students loved the retelling the story with props. Visit The Home Teacher and scroll to the bottom to see her cute story props. Her nomenclature cards can also be used for storytelling. 

At Make Learning Fun, find a story stick, felt board pictures, a word wall, sequencing cards, and more. 

Find this at Chapel Hill Snippets
There are a lot of speech and language opportunities in the FREE Big Pumpkin Reports for students preschool to grades 3 at Teaching Heart.net

Find printable story props, made with Boardmaker, at Chapel Hill Snippets

Freda, at Frogs in First, wrote that this book works well when talking about story elements. Characters are clearly defined and there are only two settings and a well designed problem and solution. Check out her graphic organizers created for Big Pumpkin


There are eleven FREE activities, made for Big Pumpkin, at Teachers pay Teachers.  

Kat Anderson reads Big Pumpkin on Vimeo. This could be part of a great take-home activity.

Enjoy!!

Diana

© 2013

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Tuesday's Treasure Box: Educreations for Speech and Language

Educreations is an app that I put on my iPad last year, but deleted it after thinking that it looked too much like math J. A few weeks ago a fabulous special education teacher showed me all that she did with the app and I had the need to take a second look.  

A Google search for Educreations provided me with links to math and chemistry tutorials, but searches for Educreations plus kindergarten and Educreations plus speech therapy gave me links to many activity ideas for speech and language therapy. Educreations is a screen-casting tool. It records everything that happens on the screen along with the audio. 


One IMPORTANT thing to know about Educreations is that it is very easy to share a screen-cast with parents through email. 

Tara, the SpeechyKeen SLP uses this app to wrap-up a session with upper-elementary and middle school students. Educreations is a motivating way for her students to give a review of the lesson, demonstrate what they've learned, and share with parents. Visit her post to learn more!

Describe pumpkins or anything else. Visit my description of the pumpkin that I drew here OR even better, listen to a kindergarten student describe his "army ant" at EdTech in Action - Exploring Educreations in Kindergarten.

At Word Work with Educreations by Natalie Keenen, one teacher tells how her students take pictures of themselves or an object in the room and put describing words all over their photo while recording themselves saying the words. 


Adventures in Speech Pathology
You can do so much with this app when working on speech sounds. I save articulation activities from sites such as Ms. Lane's SLP Materials and Adventures in Speech Pathology in my iBooks. Simply open the activity and take a screenshot so that you can add it to Educreations. Students can practice the activity and you can email the samples of work to parents. See my two examples* (wait for the second page) by clicking here. Take photos of your articulation pictures or activities and add them to Educreations. 

ICT with Mrs. C has several good ideas that could be adapted to be used with many speech and language objectives. 

Scroll down the page at Lone Mountain Elementary School to hear students retell the story Go Away, Big Green Monster! by Ed Emberly. 

I like Storytelling: Minus the Writing at mattBgomez, Kindergarten Teacher.

Educreations can be used as a writing or drawing tool during barrier games. Check out Eggs-actly Descriptive Game Cards at In Spontaneous Speech

Read how the SLP at peachy speech used Educreations to teach monthly themes in the areas of social skills and language.

Here is a link to a 10 minute tutorial made with Educreations that tells about all of the features of Educreations. 

I hope that you enjoyed my Tuesday's Treasure Box! If you have used Educreations and have more ideas, please share by leaving a comment. 

Diana

*Examples:

"2 Syllable Words: Loaded Scenes." Adventures in Speech Pathology. N.p., 20 Feb. 2013. Web. 11 Oct. 1013.<http://adventuresinspeechpathology.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/2-syllable-animal-scene-1.pdf>

"Ms. Lane's SLP Materials: Articulation: Sp Blends Sentence Flash Cards." Ms. Lane's SLP Materials. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Oct. 2013.   <http://slpmaterials.blogspot.com/2013/06/articulation-sp-blends-sentence-flash.html>




© 2013