GFTA-2 Supplemental norms: Are you missing out?

A few months ago, I was reading the the Goldman Fristoe Test of Articulation-2 (GFTA-2) Administration manual.  I know it sounds like a HUGE nerd alert, but it's not like I brought it along on a beach vacation.  It was to help me finalize new evaluation templates at my work.  

I had always found the GFTA-2 to have confusing norms/percentiles.  I might have a client with a standard score of 91 and a percentile of 9.  In outpatient settings, a 9th percentile score might qualify for services whereas a 91 wouldn't.

Anyhow as I was reviewing the manual, I found a statement that said, "The standard deviation cannot be interpreted in the same way as other measures.  Articulation ability is not normally distributed in the population in the same way as are many other abilities such as intelligence or vocabulary knowledge which can be based on standard scores"

So what does that mean?  It is explaining why the percentiles on the GFTA-2 are different than what you would see on a typical test.  Another issue with using standard scores with an articulation test is that it doesn't take into account the types of errors that were made.  It's possible to have a child that comes in who is able to make all of their later developing sounds but isn't able to produce early developing sounds (p, b, m, t, d)  or vowels (which aren't assessed on the GFTA-2)

I have flexibility in an outpatient setting to look at the number/type of errors, look at the child's intelligibility and compare them to developmental charts to make my decision about treatment. In the schools, we need to follow the state guidelines for getting children on caseloads.

There's a slim blue book that comes with the GFTA-2 which I routinely ignored until I was reviewing the manual.

Supplemental Developmental Norms for ages 2-8 years of age.  It contains p values for each sound in each position (initial, medial, final).  And here's the really cool thing.  It compares the child's performance to their same aged peers for each sound!  The p values are a percentage of the correct response for each sound.  No more guessing or pulling out developmental charts.  I can tell a parent definitively that only 42% of 4 year olds produce the /r/ sound in the initial position.  Or I can try to qualify a kid who is 7 who only has a /r/ errors by noting that 92% of his peers are able to produce the sound in the final position.  I'm totally making up these particular numbers since I don't have the norms book at my house!  

About a year ago, I got a survey from Pearson r.e. a new GFTA assessment so I'm not sure how long it will be before they come out with it.  But some of the questions on it made me pretty excited.  Possible new features included:

• Vowel assessment
• Syllable assessments 
• More /r/ probes
• More than one context for each sound

What features would you love to see in an articulation test?  And what are your favorite tests for articulation?  

What's New at Speech2U: June Edition

Last month I decided to do one MEGAPOST per month on new products that I have at my TPT and Teacher's Notebook stores.

All Products are listed on Facebook and are on sale for up to 50% off for the first two days that I list a product on TPT.  You can like my page of Facebook so that you don't miss any good sales!  

The rest of the posts for the months will be therapy activities, some reviews of other products and how I used them, silly stories, my Mom-on-day challenges etc.  Let me know if you like this or if you prefer to hear about products in individual posts!

Stack the Sandwiches: A category matching game

This is a quick, fun game to reinforce categorization skills.  It's played similar to speed.  Students flip cards and match them onto the categories.  In order to win the completed sandwich, they need to state 2 more members in the category.  Categories include: Sea animals, farm animals, jungle animals, pets, water vehicles, road vehicles, air vehicles, fruits, vegetables, art supplies, toys, tools, and furniture.

Pack Your Bags Articulation Vacation:  

This is another quick, fun game to play.  I have packets for Velars, Bilabials, and Alveolars.  Each activity has more than 100 pictures included focusing on sounds in all positions.  The game is played similar to "I'm going to Grandma's and I'm bringing...." It's great for carryover.  Ideas for movement are also included!  

Stoplight Emotions

I work with a lot of kids with emotional behavioral disorders or who are on the Autism Spectrum.  My husband did all of the illustrations for the characters.  Check out his AMAZING work here. I really like that it is more diverse as it is sometimes hard to get those materials through regular clip art providers.  This packet includes games and activity ideas to teach emotions, different levels of emotions (synonyms for happy, mad, sad, scared) and teaching cards focused on what each emotion feels like broken down by body part.  (I'm hoping that this becomes a best seller because then I can convince him to do some more illustrations for some emotions and problem solving activities that I want to add...)

Don't be a Zombie: Pragmatic/Nonverbal Language Skills

Most of my clients like the Plants vs. Zombies game.  I thought these zombies were cute enough that you could use them at school but still motivating for my kiddoes.  All of the activities focus on pragmatic language and nonverbal language including: Personal space, Personal Hygiene, Tone of Voice and Nonverbal gestures.

Interactive Flashcards: Inference Riddles:

I'm really, really loving using these "interactive" flashcards with my students who need more visuals to complete these higher functioning language tasks.  I use inference riddles a lot but most of the activities I had either had 2-3 of the same pictures allowing the child to memorize the card OR had the picture of the object ON the card which limited my ability to use visuals to help them answer the questions.  With this activity, you can also work on teaching kids how to use deductive reasoning to determine the answers.

Do you have a favorite among these?  Enter to win a copy of your choice below!

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Mom-on-days: The Family Meal Challenge

The Challenge
I've always had an interest in cooking.  In college, I once served Spanakopita at a kegger party at my sorority.  I've gone through spurts where I didn't cook.  I refused to pay for a meal plan in grad school but lived in the dorms.  I made it through in 2 years by living on Lean Cuisine meals 3x/day.

I completely burnt myself on these meals but couldn't figure out what else to eat with just a microwave in the room.  I can't remember if there was a kitchen in the dorm or not.  As it turns out, there is a cookbook called Microwave cooking for One, available on Amazon.  You have to go and read the reviews-they are so sarcastic, you WILL laugh out loud.  These would probably even be a good middle school activity-can they figure out the sarcasm?  

Cooking was an opportunity for me to get creative AND to unwind after a long day of work.  I could come home, pour myself a nice glass of wine and spend the next thirty minutes chopping up my food for the meal.  I loved the smell of garlic cooking.

Like many things (reading, shopping, bathing, using the bathroom) cooking became less pleasurable after I gave birth to my sweet Cheddar biscuit.

When I was still breastfeeding, cooking became a race against the baby clock.  Could I get the meal done and eat it before it was time for his next feeding?  Never.  It was like he had radar that went off when the fork touched my lips.  

Once he started crawling, I became paranoid that I would drop hot food on his head.

When he became a toddler, I needed to master chopping food while he attempted to weave in and out of my legs.  If he was quiet, it meant he'd taken my work shirt for the next day and flushed it down the toilet.

Now that he is a preschooler, here is how most of our nights go:

I work 10 hour shifts (4 days per week.)  By the time we get home, we have about 1.5 hours before bedtime.  My husband is often working later.  So before bedtime we need to: make and eat dinner, take the dog for a walk, and get a bath in.  This is in addition to errands (grocery shopping) that may not have completely gotten done during the weekend.

In order to make this work, we ended up in a bad routine.  We come home and I'd make something quick for the biscuit.  Most quick foods involve highly processed foods-mac and cheese, chicken nuggets, hot dogs.  Even buying organic, I knew that these weren't the foods I wanted to choose for my child.  Most of his meals he would eat by himself while I prepared our meal for the evening.  We'd end up eating around 9:30 after the Biscuit was in bed.

The Experience
I decided to set my goals small-even getting 2 family meals consistently set up is better than where we were at.  I prepped the first meal on Sunday-when my husband was grilling up hamburgers, I added a turkey tenderloin to the grill.  Then on Monday I was able to pull it out, add some rhubarb salsa I'd made earlier and a bag of mixed greens with store bought salad dressing.

Perfect, except the turkey was a little dry.  I might take it off the grill a little sooner knowing that I was going to reheat it the next day.

The second meal I involved my little guy in the planning: he helped me pick out the lettuce and radishes at the local farmer's market.

This ended up being a little more of an ordeal than I thought.  The first market we went to was closed due to storms and downed power lines.  I ended up driving to another which was Downtown.  We weren't able to get street parking because there was a walk to cure something.  The parking lot we pulled into required me to pay by phone which due to the limitations of voice activation (which kept disconnecting every time I had to yell to the little one to stay by me) took about 20 minutes to set up.  And it cost me over 5.00.  

I chopped the vegetables the night before and had my husband watch the Biscuit while I prepped the meal.  It turned out pretty good!

5 Quick Hints for Weeknight Cooking:

1.  Prep ahead:  If you are cooking chicken breasts add extras or different meats for your next meal.
2.  Purchase a mandoline slicer:  This is great for quick slicing for Zucchini, radishes, onions, etc.)
3.  Buy pre-chopped vegetables or prep vegetables a few days ahead.   I like to try to chop my own veggies to save money but precut lettuce and vegetables really save time on the weeknight.  I got my lettuce at the farmer's market so it tasted a little fresher than the store bags.
4.  Divide the responsibilities:  I'm in charge of grocery shopping and cooking-my husband handles all of the clean up.  I let the Biscuit set the table.
5.  Plan ahead.  I love Salads for lunch.  In order to avoid Salad burnout, I'm trying a different salad each week.  I make up my salads for the week (and can them) when making up my salad on Monday.  

Next Challenge:  Finish up at least 2 Pinterest projects (one might be the Batman cozy coupe.)

What planet are you on? An out of this World social skills packet you need to get right now.

I have a lot of clients with social challenges on my caseload.  I have taken some of Michelle Garcia Winner's Social thinking courses and have a few of her books.  One of the difficulties in this area if finding appropriate, relevant scenarios for kids.  I have one deck of social problem cards which is from the 80's.  Some of the scenarios are good but it's hard to make someone with feathered hair appear relevant to my kids.

Felice at the Dabbling Speechie has the PERFECT product for this: What Planet are you On?  An out of this World Social Skills Pack. 

This 40 page packet comes with SO many games, you could spend a month or more using it in therapy.  I loved the Alien theme.  It allowed me to work with these concepts AND take some of the pressure off of the client that I was working with.  It wasn't him we were talking about-it was those silly aliens.  They just didn't understand Human behavior.

This packet is broken up into 5 different Activities!  The first is called Conversation Blast.

Conversation Blast
It comes with cue cards for questions/comments as well as suggested conversational topics.  This activity is really visual and would be helpful in a group setting to see who is taking the most turns in a conversation.  In a one on one session, it might be fun to attach the comment/question cards to square blocks.  It would be another way to visually show the students how they are "building" a conversation. If they get too off topic or don't shift topics correctly-you could have the "Off topic" asteroid cards come in and knock the tower down.

What planet is my Brain on?
It includes situation cards, poster cards talking about "where your brain is" AND cute "My brain is on Earth" reinforcement cards.  I LOVED this analogy.  The reinforcement cards are small enough that you could have them tape it to their desk and the teacher could easily give positive reinforcement during the day.

COMPARE/CONTRAST: Human vs. Alien Behavior:  
This activity comes with a Venn diagram, and social rules posters.  It's great for helping kids compare what is expected from Humans and what is Expected from Aliens.

What impression are you making?
I love, love, love that this is included in this pack.  Perspective taking is difficult for most of my kids but they reeeeeeaaaaaaallllllllly struggle with understanding that other people form opinions about them based on their behavior.  It comes with 46 different scenarios focusing on what you should be thinking and what impressions you are making.   The scenarios are listed on one page which is easy on the ink and also great for just including a binder of speech materials if you travel a lot.

Expected and Unexpected Behavior© 

Expected and Unexpected behavior are concepts from Michelle Garcia Winner's Social thinking course.    I find it really helpful to use these concepts with my kids.  I even use it with my 4 year old.  But I'm always struggling to come up with ideas for this.  The dabbling Speechie provides 24 stimulus cards addressing these.  One of the things that I really liked about these is that they are very "real world" scenarios.  (example: Sam left his paper lunch bag, empty bag of chips and apple core on the kitchen table.)  This activity is also comes with a fun game where you try to get your astronaut to the moon.  

If you work with students with Social thinking challenges I HIGHLY recommend this product.  I loved the theme, the different activities and the amount of scenario cards.  Each activity comes with ideas for teaching.   I think you could use this to structure a group for at least 2-3 months if you focused on each activity/concept for 2-3 weeks.  It's a steal at only 5.00!!!  Check it out on her TPT store: What Planet are you On?  An out of this World Social Skills Pack.  

 If you liked what you saw, you can learn more about the Dabbling Speechie and her materials here:  

The Dabbling Speechie's blog:  

Facebook: 

Teachers Pay Teachers

The Dabbling Speechie has been kind enough to offer one copy of her product to a reader.  Enter below to win your copy!  

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Mom-on-days: First Blog Challenge

The Challenge:  
Make it through the walk around the block with the little guy and my dog without saying:

Why are you stopping?
Can you hurry up?
Mommy's ready to make dinner.  

I've always loved going for walks.  When I was pregnant, I would go on long walks with the dog.  Sometimes this caused dilemmas.  When you are 8-9 months pregnant, you have to use the bathroom a lot.  It makes it hard to take that 2-3 mile walk.

When my guy was a baby, we would take the stroller out with the dog and walk to the park by the Mississippi River.  I would turn on an audio book (mysteries and thrillers are my favorite) and just enjoy the scenery.

Unfortunately, cute little babies eventually learn how to walk and begin to refuse the stroller.  So for the last few years, I've found myself taking less and less walks.  This year, I vowed that would change.

My little guy has a nickname: Cheddar biscuit.  I was stocking my freezer with post-baby meals at Let's Dish when I mentioned to my friends that I hadn't decided on a name yet.   One friend suggested I name him Cheddar Biscuit.  The nickname stuck.  Poor guy.  

This year the Biscuit is learning to ride his bike.  He's starting to move a little faster and I thought we could start getting a little exercise between him and the dog.  The first two times I tried to walk down to the Park.  It took 2-3 hours to get back home.  So I decided to shorten it to a walk around Poop park.  Named mostly because people on my block apparently haven't heard of doggie waste bags.  However as I am writing this, I realize I need to come up with a better name to entice the Biscuit on this adventure.  

I mapped this out at .15 miles.  In theory, it should take 5 minutes.  In Biscuit time it takes at least an hour.  My challenge was to take a few breaths and really try to enjoy the walk by looking through his eyes.

The Experience:  
I hurt my foot a few weeks ago so put off my challenge/experiment until this last weekend.  I started by giving myself a pep talk reminding me of what my challenge was.  I decided to try it when I didn't have to work the next day.  It started off really well.  I brought my camera to document our first adventure.  It was probably a mistake.  

We walked about 5 feet and the Biscuit stopped to tell me a story about his shoes and another kid at his daycare.  I took a big breath to steady myself and looked down at the Maple tree seeds.  I could show him how they fly like a helicopter!!!  This was a fun activity and one that he seemed to enjoy.  We had races to see whose whirlybird would drop first.

We continued on and I started to say, "Hurr." but then would stop myself and say, 'Hurricane." Odd, I know, but at least let me avoid failing my first every blog challenge.  I wanted to try to take time to see the world from his eyes.  Unfortunately, his agenda was to commandeer my camera.  So here (minus the backside, and decapitated photos of myself) was the park experience through his eyes.  

It was interesting to me because what he finds IMPORTANT is definitely different from what I find to be important.  In some ways giving him the camera allowed me to experience the world from his view. He came home and sneaked downstairs with the camera.  He then took about 20 pictures of our toilet. I didn't put them up-feel free to thank me!  

The Results:

I don't think I passed the challenge this time.  However, just setting the intention of becoming more patient and observant helped make the experience more enjoyable for me AND him.  I think it's something that I can keep working on.

Summer blogger Mom-on-day challenge #2:  Fix 2 family meals this week that don't involve Mac-n-cheese or Peanut butter sandwiches.  

Lazy Day Articulation

I have this really cool product I bought to work with one of my clients on the TH sound.  All I have to do is print it off and I know we are going to have a lot of fun with it.  

But there's a lot of steps involved with this project:  

• Walk over to computer 
• Find the product and open it.  
• Open file and press print.  
• Place sheets in Sheet protectors.
• Remember to put in bag and bring to work.
• Remember to take out of bag and put in Speech therapy room.  

Yes, I know.  I am pretty pathetic this week.  Part of the problem is that my computer at home seems to have some sort of terminal illness.  I started backing up materials and found ALL of these great games, activities and articles that I had downloaded.  I might just be having some executive function difficulties in initiating organizing these projects.  Yesterday my computer screen was white for about an hour and came back on.  Right now I am procrastinating backing up my photos by writing this blog post...

My inability to prepare for my sessions (but yet complete ability to prepare a margarita for outdoor sitting) led me to these 2 very LAZY day articulation suggestions.

Pick it up.  

For this activity, I placed the cards on the table and had the client practice each card 2-3 times.  Then they flipped them on the floor.  Then they told me to "Pick it up."  I gave a few excuses for why I thought they should pick it up (I'm too old, my back hurts, I can't see it without my glasses, I don't know which one to pick up...)  This game was a favorite-my kids LOVE to tell me what to do.  And they apparently really like telling me to do things when I don't seem to want to do it.  

Buckaroo Variation:  

Buckaroo and Mousetrap are two of my least favorite speech therapy games.  Mousetrap because it takes the entire session to set up the game.  Buckaroo meets my criteria for being a short game and kids can practice speech cards to earn items to place on buckaroo.  But it just seems like he is always kicking the stuff off.  This game actually happened by accident.  We were playing the game and I had my speech cards behind the feet.  

The client had touched the saddle and the donkey kicked up-scattering all of my speech cards on the floor.  Hilarious.  We practiced our sounds as we picked them up off the floor and then had to do it again and again.  

/s/ Blend Monster Trucks and a GIVEAWAY

My summer of ORGANIZATION also includes organizing my Teacher's pay teachers and Teacher's notebook products for the Fall.  I'm also hoping to be able to spotlight some of my SLP friends great products and offer some give aways as well!

Thank you to Rae at Rae's Speech Spot for allowing me to review her S Blend Monster Truck activity.

 I have a few "favorite" speech goals: syllable shapes, final consonants and Blends.  I find that improving these three can make a huge difference in a child's intelligibility.  My caseload is predominantly boys so the Monster Truck theme fit perfectly.  Although I try to study up on most of my client's interests, I have very little monster truck knowledge.  I can usually get by with just throwing "gravedigger" (a popular monster truck?) around during the session.  

Monster Truck /s/ blends comes with 104 picture targets with the monster truck and a clear graphic below.  The pictures are colorful and it was easy for clients to identify what the pictures were.  Did I mention that she has included 104 pictures????  Super Duper's photo artic deck (which is also awesome!) comes with 28.  

I love that it is separated out by blend type (ex. sp blends.)  You could incorporate these pretty easily into a Phonology activity by checking their ability to produce the sounds first, then choosing 4 of the pictures for additional activities 

For this page, I might...

• play I spy
• put spots on a paper with dot to dot markers
• cover the spots with sparkly glitter glue
• eat a snack with a spoon.)

Afterwards you could check their ability to produce the blends again with the pictures.  

Rae includes directions for a matching game and mixed /s/ blend BINGO cards!  

I like that she has provided 2 options: one with the monster trucks and one with the actual pictures.  She also provides Racing flags and Monster truck tokens.  

My favorite part of this activity is the Monster truck is her cuing cards.  They were really helpful in demonstrating the airflow for /s/.  Plus they were very motivating.  We used little micromachine cars with this too.  

I printed these activities 2 per page to save paper and ink but I would probably print the cuing sheets full size. 

Rae is a GREAT resource for Preschool therapy ideas.  You can follow her here:  

Rae's Speech Spot BLOG: 
Facebook
Teacher's Pay Teachers:

Rae has generously donated one copy of Monster /s/ Blends for a lucky Speech2U reader.

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Mama-on-days

I'm trialing out a new feature over the summer called Mama-ondays.  I find that I spend a lot of time researching and finding new activities for the kids that I work with.  Then I come home-after 10 hours I'm pretty tired.

I sometimes wish that I was a Pinterest mom and not just a Pint-ther-a-pist.  But I also recognize that some of what I am doing is good.  For example, my son already knows:

1.  He is not number one.
2.  Mommy likes alone time.
3.  Mommy doesn't like kids who talk all the time even though she is a (his most recent pronunciation): a SPEECH LANGUAGE APOLOGIST.

I am okay with that-in fact I think it's healthy.  But it's also pretty fun to spend some time doing field trips or cool crafts or special baths.  So on Mama-on-days through the summer-I am going to set a weekly "parenting, house cleaning, organizational" goal.  And then the next week, I'll let you know how it went.  I'm lying about the housecleaning.  That's probably not going to get done.  

Here is my parenting challenge for this week:  Make it through the walk around the block with the little guy and my dog without saying:

Why are you stopping?
Can you hurry up?
Mommy's ready to make dinner.  

This one's going to be pretty challenging.  But I think I can do it, maybe.

June Link Up

Laura, over at Oh How Pintearesting has done it again.  Her June blog link up is Father's day themed with mustaches.

When I see Father's Day cards or Father's day presents at the store, it's like getting hit in the gut.  It takes my breath away for a second.  It's only been a little over a year since my dad died so I'm hoping that it will keep getting a little bit better every year.  

I love a good mustache themed activity.  I have some mustache paper chip clip holders and my friend knitted me a mustache pin with googly eyes and a mustache finger sleeve you can put on your finger and pretend to have a mustache.  Sometimes I get a little paranoid that I might be growing a mustache and not noticing it.  You see those ladies that walk around with mustaches.  I'll try to post a picture at least once a year, if you promise to let me know if you see any mustache action happening...  

If you haven't participated in a blog link up, it's really a fun way to get to know some other bloggers and get new traffic to your site.  Head over to Oh how Pintearesting  to get the cute mustache graphic and learn how to participate.

 

Jamming to:   Shy that Way by Tristan Prettyman and Jason Mraz.  I can let this one go on repeat for quite awhile before I get tired of it.  

Unwinding:  Watching Game of Thrones and Mad Men.  Although Game of Thrones has been really crazy lately so a little harder for me to completely unwind when watching it.  

NEEDING: A budget and an organized home.  I'm going down to 1 job for this Fall.  I'm excited for the extra time with my little guy but am definitely going to need to sit down and adjust my budget.  And I need to get my closets and laundry room organized.   I found a blog called Living Well and Spending Less with some GREAT suggestions for pairing down your wardrobe: 40 hangers or less.  I'm excited to get myself organized!  

EXCITED ABOUT: Turtle races.  We are spending a week at a resort and I cannot wait.  Beach vacations are perfect for 4 year olds so I think it will be mostly relaxing and stress free.  We will also go see a giant talking Paul Bunyan and participate in Turtle races.  

Do you have any summer trips planned?  

Bad TV, good therapy?

I used to gauge people's age by whether or not they had heard about the Krofft Family Superstars.  Anyone that was younger than me hadn't heard of it.  This was my FAVORITE show on Saturday mornings (I suppose now I could gauge ages by who watched Saturday morning cartoons.)  They had a variety of different shows they aired:

• Sigmund the Sea Monster
• The Bugaloos
• The Incredible Dr. Shrinker
• Electra Woman and DynaGirl
• Land of the lost

My favorite was Electra Woman and Dynagirl!  I LOVED pretending to be Electrawoman when I was growing up.  

The acting, costumes and sets are terrible.  Perfect for working on some compare and contrast activities.  

I'd start by giving them the name of the show: and then asking them to predict what the show was about.  You could do this with EET-describing what you think they would look like, what the characters would do. 

Then we watched the opening credits.  We discussed whether we thought this was a current show or if it was an older show.  We talked about what clues we used to figure out that it was not a current show. We discussed how today's movies are the same and how they are different from this show.  (Ex. There are good guys and bad guys on each show.  In Electra woman and DynaGirl it doesn't really look like they are running fast, in movies now it looks more realistic.)  Bonus points to the first person who guesses the celebrity in this t.v. show.  

Here is another one we used to work on predicting, inferencing and comparing and contrasting:   

We started by describing a Sea monster using the Expanding Expression Tool.  What did they think the Sea monster would look like.  I also used this to talk about Michelle Garcia Winner's Expected and Unexpected Behaviors ©.  In the beginning of the video Sigmund's family are saying mean things to him and then kick him out.  We can talk about how he would feel and what he is thinking.  We can talk about the importance of not "popping" your thought bubble.   There is another scene where the two boys are trying to carry Sigmund across the street-and drop him.  We talked about what people might think if they saw a sea monster on the road.  Would the people on the road find Sigmund scary (why or why not.)  

Here are a couple more that we haven't used in therapy yet. 

The costumes and acting are hilarious!  What are your favorite old TV shows?  

Ready, Set, Action Verbs: FREEBIE!

I realized that my freebie tab at the top of my page doesn't work.  I tried to highlight some of my free stuff on my 10,000 page view page.  Maybe I will figure it out this summer-although the warm weather makes it difficult for me to concentrate.






I really enjoy using the Tensebuilder App by Mobile Education to help teach verb tenses with my clients.  As we were doing it, I thought about how fun it would be to personalize this to each client.  It was equally motivating to kids with morpho-syntactic difficulties, children on the autism spectrum disorder and children with Down Syndrome.  You could even choose your verb list based on phonemes to make it a fun articulation activity!


Here's how I did it:

1.  Start by getting permission from the parents to videotape their child.  For this video, I used my dog and an action figure.  No permission needed!  My dog Maxx recently ate a really cute pair of red sandals so I'm trying to humiliate him by posting this picture on my blog.  I don't think it will help.

2.  Start by video taping the child doing a variety of actions.  It works best to have them spend about 5 seconds to start, 5 seconds to do the action and 5 seconds to finish the action.  This is a great way to practice verb vocabulary!  It was interesting to see if they understood the word or if they needed me to model this.  
3.  I used iMovie to edit the videos.  You can read about how to edit in iMovies here. 
4.  Depending on what you want to work on, there are two ways I would recommend editing the videos.

Adding just the verb title to practice expressive use:  

You can edit this with your client.  Show them the video and ask what they did.  Add the title by double tapping on the video at the bottom.  Once the video is published, you could watch it-and cue like this:

Me:  What will the dog do?  

Child A: The dog will jump.

Pause as the dog is jumping; 

Me: What IS the dog doing?

Child A: The dog is jumping.

Pause after: 

Me: What did the dog do?

Child A: The dog jumped.  

Fantastic.  Child A is ready for discharge-no cues needed.  

Adding subtitles to teach verb tenses:  

Another way to use these videos is to add subtitles in for each future, present and past tense.  This can help teach the child in real time how we use different verb tenses.  It works really well if you have Hyperlexic clients or clients who can read.  For nonreaders, I would say the action as they are doing it.  

If you want to add in subtitles, you will need to trim each clip to add the header.  

For example: 

I selected just the part of the video where Hulk is standing on Batman's cave.  I added the title: "Hulk will fall."  

Then I selected the part of the video where Hulk is falling.  I added the title, "Hulk is falling."

Finally I selected the last part of the video and added the title, "Hulk fell."

After your videos are finished in iMovie, you can go to the home page to share the movie on iTunes, your camera roll or YouTube.  Just make sure if you are using YouTube that you set the video to private.  

Here is my final movie project:  

I also created a freebie with some cute Movie Clappers and suggestions for good verbs to use.

You can find Ready, Set, Action Verbs on my Teachers Pay Teachers store.

If you try this I'd love to hear what you thought about this project!

SLPs Care for Oklahoma-and you can too.

"Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much."
 - Helen Keller

Lately it has seemed like every time I turn on the television there is another tragedy: a tornado, a bombing, a school shooting, a landslide...It's easy to start to feel overwhelmed-to feel like the world is turning into a scary place.  I'm just one person-I can't stop the weather or terrorism or evil people.  

But there are things I can do.  I can do is try to be kind.  I can listen to people when they are upset.  I can try to help out in whatever small ways I can.  

More than 10,000 buildings were damaged when the tornados hit Moore, Oklahoma on May 20th. Hundreds were injured.  24 people died.  2 schools were destroyed.  1 Speech therapy blogger wrote about her experience.  

And the Speech bloggers responded.   

You are going to want to read about what they did-and what you can do to help.  

(Envelope graphics purchased from Graphics From the Pond--Stamp Graphic From  Putting Words in Your Mouth)

It's going to make you PROUD to be a Speech Language Pathologist.