A Unique book to work on Following Directions

Do you ever find yourself purchasing gifts for your kids that you know you will use in therapy later?  The Biscuit has had a lot of those gifts.  Last year for his birthday, I found a unique book called "Press Here" by Hervé Tullet.

There is a direction on each page.  The child completes the direction and the next page shows "what happened" based on their actions.

This just became the Biscuit's favorite books so I'm going to have to wait awhile until I can bring it to work.  But here are some of the actions/vocabulary you could target:

• press
• rub
• left/right
• tap
• shake
• tilt
• blow
• stand
• Clap
• harder

Spring Blog Hop

Welcome to the SLP Spring Fever Blog Hop! 

You will get the chance to win prizes and get freebies by touring 12 fantastic blogs. Here is the lineup:

1. Figuratively Speeching SLP

2. Just Wright Speech

3. Queen's Speech

4. Putting Words in your Mouth

5. Straight Up Speech

6. The Speech Umbrella

7. Miss Thrifty SLP

8. Rae's Speech Spot

9. Speech2U

10. Word to the Wise

11. Let's Talk Speech Language Pathology

12. SLP for Me – guest posting on Figuratively Speeching SLP

12 winners will receive a goodie basket of one Spring-themed activity from each participating blog owner/page owner in the blog hop.

A grand prize winner will receive the following in addition to the activities:
Codes for 3 Hamaguchi Apps (see Figuratively Speeching SLP’s reviews)
A code for a Mobile Education Store App
4 songs from Music Therapy Tunes
A green Big Grips iPad 2 case

The rules of the contest are simple: 

• You must decode a secret message. 
• In order to complete this task, you will need to visit each of the 12 blogs and download a freebie. The freebie will contain a word that is part of the code. 
• When you enter the contest through Giveaway Tools on Figuratively Speeching SLP's blog, you will be asked to type in the secret code. Have fun and enjoy blog hopping with us!
• The contest will run from Sunday, March 17, 2013 through Saturday, March 23, 2013.

MY GIVEAWAY:   I'm really excited to be participating in this giveaway.  If you are the lucky grand prize winner, you will receive a combo pack of Gnome more following directions AND Gnome more prepositions.  

MY FREEBIE:

Where is Bunny:  Prepositions in, on, next to from my previous post. You can find it on my TPT store.  

Enjoy reading through the blogs, downloading the freebies, and participating in our Blog Hop! Good luck everyone!  

Squinky Directions Part 2

I found this little Polly pocket house at Goodwill for 1.99 this weekend.  It folds up for easy storage.  I liked the fact that there are lots of different areas that you could use for spatial concepts or following directions.  The refrigerator opens, you can move the stairs or you can lift up the bed at the top of the toy to hide a toy underneath. 

I like to use real objects or toys during therapy tasks because I think it is motivating and it's functional.    I thought this would be a great opportunity to work with kids on following single and multistep directions.

Walmart had their superhero Squinkies on clearance for 4.50 per pack.  If you don't have any, now would be the time!  I'll admit I have a lot of squinkies.....  

But that just helps with describing tasks.  (Find the yellow and blue Squinkie, which Squinkie Can fly...)  Squinkies come with a variety of plastic gumball machine toy containers.  Each pack comes with a different color (red, sparkly pink, pink, clear etc.)

I also had a multi-pack of colored tongs I'd gotten through Amazon for a plane trip with my little one.  (I thought I was buying a single pair of tongs for a busy book type of game but ended up with a container of 12.)  With all of these options I was able to target a variety of directions.  (Ex. Find the yellow ball, Take the red tongs and pick up a superhero and put him in the blue car. )

When working during functional activities, I find it helps to write down my targets prior to the session so that I am able to maximize the therapy time we have.  For this activity, I decided to make up some direction cards so I would be sure to target everyone's goals during the session.  The second bonus to the cards is that it takes the pressure off of you, the speech-language pathologist.  You're not the bad guy who's just bossing them around when they want to just PLAY with their toys.  It's the cards.  For those kids that really want to just play with the superheroes for awhile, I let them earn 10 seconds of play time for every card they answered correctly.  If you are looking for some direction-following inspiration, you can use the cards that I have HERE.

Dollar Spot Christmas Trees

So I found these cool oversized sticker sheets in the Dollar Spot at Target.  I got a Christmas Tree, a Gingerbread House, and a Snowman.  I laminated them so that I could use with more than one student.

We used the Christmas Tree in therapy this week and had a LOT of fun.  I wrote some articulation words on the ornaments before I laminated them.  If I had to do it again I'd probably just laminate the ornaments and then write on them with a wet erase marker.

In addition to articulation, we also worked on:

• Receptive identification of adjective + noun.  (Show me the red striped ornament.
• Receptive identification of clauses (Show me the yellow ornament with a snowflake.)  
• Comparatives (Show me the longest strand of lights.)
• Following multistep directions, before/after directions and directions containing spatial concepts.  

I really liked being able to vary the directions depending on the student.  Here are some of the directions we used:  

• Put a red ornament on after you put on a purple ornament.
• After you put on the red striped ornament, put on a purple star ornament.
• Before you put on the yellow ornament, put on the shortest garland.
• Find the plain yellow ornament and put it next to one of the purple striped ornaments.
• Find all 4 snowflakes and put them in the middle of the tree.
• Find a yellow ornament with a snowflake on it and put it between 2 strands of lights.
• Find 2 red striped ornaments below the longest strand.
• Put the purple ornament above the garland after you put on the yellow ornament.
• Put three ornaments on the tree.
• Put the red ornament under/above the garland.  

It was a really fun activity. 

Squinkies

There is a book I recommend to parents called, "Just Give Him the Whale: 20 ways to Use Fascinations, Areas of Expertise and Strengths to Support Children with Autism" by Paula Kluth and Patrick Scharz.   It's an easy read which gives ideas for teaching skills using interest areas of children diagnosed with ASD.  I strongly believe that using the child's own interests is the IN that we need to get them learning.  I see most kids for 30 to 60 minutes per week max, so I want to make the best use of my therapy time by gaining their interest and attention right away.  As they begin to trust me more, we may experiment to see if we can expand their interest levels.

My new favorite product is: Squinkies.  They are really, really tiny figurines, so you could buy one of each set and they would fit in a pencil case.  They just started coming out with "accessories" which makes them great for following directions and basic spatial concepts.  Plus, they have sets for most of the "interest" areas for most of my caseload: Cars, Super heroes, Nemo, Disney princesses, Sponge bob, Power rangers, WWF, Toy Story, Barbies among others.   

Mainly I've been using for following directions, spatial concepts and answering where questions, but I'm sure there are lots of other ways to use these.