Smoothtastic: The extra blender

My husband has a difficult time picking out the right gift for people.  One year there was the "Tinkerbell towel" debacle.   One year for our anniversary he bought me a Tinkerbell watch.  Well, I thought it was a watch....

But it was actually a watch/lip gloss combination.  This was in my late 30's.  I'm pretty sure my window for wearing pretend watches with lip gloss containers was WAY over.  If you haven't heard-I don't really even like Tinkerbell.  

Anyhow, this year, he really tried to get me something great for my birthday.  It was from an informercial-BUT it meant that he thought ahead AND made a phone call (vs. walking into Walgreens and picking the first thing that he found.)  

He ended up buying me the Nutribullet.  

This could have ended up being a GREAT birthday present.  Who doesn't like Smoothies?  And I have never met a kitchen gadget I didn't like.  The problem with this purchase was that I already have a blender.  I have a Vitamixer which I bought to make baby food for my son when he was starting baby foods.  When he gave it to me he said, "Well I know you like your Vitamixer so I thought you'd like to try this."  

Hmmmmm.....

What was good about this purchase is that I was able to take my Nutribullet into Speech therapy with me to make Smoothies!   I'm not a cooking blog but I will say that the Nutribullet is a pretty good blender.  It left a couple of chunks of frozen fruit in my smoothies but mostly it was smooth and well blended.  

Here's what we did:  

Feeding Skills:

I work with several clients on feeding skills.  For them, I am trying to work on general acceptance of Smoothies or juice.  If I can get that, then we could really expand tastes by adding in other fruits or vegetables.  

Vocabulary Skills:

We talked about our ingredients and practiced saying the following vocabulary

Verbs: Blend, mix, turn on/off, put in, get, find
Adjectives: cold, frosty, foamy, smooth, lumpy, orange, delicious, disgusting
Prepositions: in (put IN), out (take OUT of bag), turn ON, turn OFF

Social Language:  

We practiced using politeness markers such as please and thank you while we made smoothies.  We talked about how to decline something that we don't want to try using phrases like "No thank you" "I'm full" or "Maybe later."   

Phonological awareness and articulation:  

We practiced segmenting words and identifying words segmented.  Example: "The next ingredient you need to get is: J----ooooo-------ssssssss.  What do you need?"  Alternately, we would practice segmenting the words together.  

I still have a lot of clients working on /s/ blends so we practiced saying "stir," "Smoothies," "Smooth" and "spoon."  

Sequencing and narrative skills:  

When we were done, we practiced retelling the procedure or sequenced pictures into the correct order.  

I really liked my Speech-a-dilla activities to keep me on track during the activity.  So I made another packet which I gave the awkward title of Smoothtastic too.  

It  contains 33 pages of activities including color sequencing pictures, sequencing graphic organizers, verb tense sorting mats, /s/ blend cards and extension questions.   You can find Smoothtastic on my Teachers Pay Teachers or on Teacher's Notebook.