Outdoor Fourth of July Speech and Language Fun!

The Fourth of July is just around the corner, but it's not too late to for last minute activities to tie in to your therapy sessions!  Here are a few of our favorites that require minimal prep time but are sure to be a hit with your kids!

Independence Day Ring Toss
This activity requires small flags and hula hoops or other rings that fit around the the flags.  Simply put the flags in the ground and have students toss the rings over the flags.  This activity would be so easy to incorporate with any speech sound or specific language skill such as naming categories, synonyms and antonyms, etc.

Fourth of July Balloon Game
I have done this activity before, and it was a HUGE success.  Attach a large popsicle stick to a paper plate using masking tape.  Your kids may want to decorate the stick and/or plate with patriotic colors using markers, paint, glitter, etc. Blow up a balloon, and have your kids volley it back and forth.  It is a great activity for teamwork, social referencing, and encouraging others.

Fourth of July Scavenger Hunt
The Military Wife and Mom has a free download for you to use.  It's a great way for kids to learn about the Fourth of July and target themed vocabulary at the same time!

Ice Chalk
Create ice chalk (click on link above for recipe) and use it to draw Fourth of July symbols and talk about their meaning.  You may want to create a game of Pictionary or write speech words with your kids' target sounds as they relate to the Fourth of July.

Red, White, and Blue Memory
This activity works best with a group of kids.  Sit in a circle and begin naming things that are red, white, and blue.  As each person adds an item, he or she needs to recall what the others have already named.  This is a great skill for working on auditory memory as well as categorization.

This is just a small sample of activities that are out there!  Feel free to share your ideas in the comments below!

Happy Fourth of July!

Kindness Cash

It has been weeks of overcast and gloom both inside and outside, and it's starting to take a toll on the attitudes in our classroom.  We recently started working on kindness, which I initially thought would be an easier skill to work on, but it's so general and abstract that is has proved to be somewhat challenging.  I started by introducing and reviewing the concept for several days.  

Intermixed with a few introductory activities, I decided to use Kindness Cash.  Sounds silly, I know, but it's working!  

Students can earn Kindness Cash by following through with being friendly, considerate, and being generous.  They are working to earn as much cash as they can until the day before spring break when they can use it to buy a breakfast provided by myself and the paras.  (We won't tell them that making breakfast isn't our forte.  I think the mention of just eating is enough to hook them!)  The amount of cash they earn will determine what they can choose for breakfast.  Wish us luck!

You can find Kindness Cash here at our TPT store.  Please let us know how you plan to use it!

Smash Ball? A What? All in the Name of Therapy Fun

Last week I was walking through the mall and noticed a kiosk where people were throwing something that looked like water balloons, but they were not actually breaking.  I moved closer to check it out and learned about the Smash Water Ball. A sticky water filled ball that when thrown flattens and then regains it shape..At the mall they were a bit over priced, so I went home and read some reviews online before deciding to buy a box of 12 on Amazon. I did. I bought a whole box partially because reviews stated they amazing fun and partially because one Smash Ball cost 5 dollars but the box cost 12 dollars. It mostly came down to price:

Here is the package:

Here is what it looked like in action........

This is how it worked in therapy. We laid out the cards and then the student would aim and hit a card. If they said their sounds, sentences or answered a question, my students were able to keep the cards they "smashed." Now for a demo.....

Here are my Pros and Cons with this product for therapy:

Pro: They are fun to play with and they stick to any flat surface
        They can be washed with a little soap and water to get dust off
        Stress relief for kids or adults
        Goes back to its original shape easily.
        Affordable at $1.05 each if you buy 12
        Motivating to all of my summer kids ages 2-17
        Works great with articulation, language or more-

Con:
       Plasticky smell when opened
       The first one leaked after two hours
       A little too sticky for the wall (does ok with the door or table vs. paint)
       Must not squeeze too hard or they also will break


Overall the water ball was very motivating to my students and was minimal prep for me!

Our 5th Grade Friends' Poetry Fun

Happy Poetry Month from Team 5B!  As a guest blogger this week/month, I would love to share some of the awesome ways our team celebrated poetry and writing, as our students couldn’t get enough of it! To kick poetry month off, my fellow teammates and I acted out our interpretation of the popular poem, Casey at the Bat. I’ve never enjoyed being laughed at so much! The discussion that followed was filled with curiosity and excitement to read and understand more poems. A great introduction to a fabulous unit-

Within the classroom, all of our reading groups were engaged in reading and annotating poetry every day. We completed “a poem a day” packet that encouraged and invited conversations around elements of poetry, themes, tones, author’s purpose and text structure. It was amazing how poems just “lend” themselves to evoke these conversations naturally in our classes.  In addition, students worked on alliteration tongue twisters (our tongue tying champ could read “Better Botter” effortlessly in 13 seconds, by the way!) wrote and designed hilarious idiom pictures, annotated The Road Not Taken, and created a “Poet-tree” to help them remember important elements and terms used throughout the unit.

What made the unit complete was a visit by an amazing author by the name of Kenn Nesbitt. Kenn is a poet laureate and writes very entertaining poetry that our students simply love. With the help and financial assistance of our glorious PTO, we were fortunate enough to have a Skype session with Mr. Nesbitt. His energy and enthusiasm were remarkable and so engaging. He talked about his childhood and when he became interested in writing poetry, and then showed our classes the power of poems by writing one with us! The process he used and discussion he engaged with our group was just what the doctor ordered. Our kids couldn’t stop talking about him and “our” poem for weeks! (yes, they are STILL talking and adding stanzas to our poem!

To close up this unit, what better way to celebrate students’ personal poetry than with a Poetry Jam?!? Students spent the last week writing their own poems using a poetry café menu. The requirements included the follow criteria:

·     

•    An appetizer (theme/big idea)
•       Soup de Jour (mood/tone)
•      Main Course (Form)
•       Dessert (poetic devices)

We set up our poetry jam to have that “café” feel…. Dimmed lighting, cozy atmosphere, doughnuts and juice, and spotlight area for our authors. And the poems…. WOW. Everything from acrostics on friends and family, to song parodies for “Let it Go” (became “Read a Book”).  It was AMAZEBALLS!! I am constantly astonished with how our kiddos grab on to a task and truly make it their own. The enthusiasm and ownership they took for this project was like nothing I’ve witnessed before, largely in part to all of the above elements. Just another great reminder of the importance of how we are teaching, and not necessarily what we are teaching.

Mighty Ducks! A Compare Contrast Activity!

My elementary students seldom initiate conversations without prompting, but last week my school held a fundraiser that changed my normally tepid sharers to a level of wonder that could not be suppressed. What had them wondering, conversing, sharing and comparing were small plastic duck key chains that looked like celebrities. While I am not one to judge interests, I am an opportunistic SLP that will play to the interest areas of my students to get the best bang-for-my-buck. So what I did was find my own ducks so we could compare and contrast and infer information. You can get your set here.


Here is what the ducks look like:

After pulling two ducks out of the bag at random I had students use a Venn diagram to brain storm ideas before writing about the the ducky similarities and differences paragraph form.

After we finished with the ducks we moved on to characters in novels they were reading in their classrooms. They loved starting with the ducks before tackling the daunting task of grade level text and complex character contrasting. This activity worked well for all! 

What are your students interested in this year that you have incorporated into therapy?

It's Our First Blogiversary!

Its hard to believe, but we have been doing this for a year…..

In that year we have learned to step out of our comfort zone…..

We posted on the blog 173 times…..

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We hope you have enjoyed sharing in this journey, Here is to many more years of fun!