More Easter Activities.

A few more things going in my Speech world this week

Easter Cookies

I found this cookie set at Target and thought it was great for targeting attribute + noun phrases (red frosting, green sprinkles), sequencing, and choice making.  

Egg-laying Chicken.  

This toy cracks me up.  Wind him up and he walks around the room laying "eggs."  I'm not sure exactly what common core standard he addresses, but he is really fun.  

Bunny Faces:  

I saw these cute bunny faces from Doodle Bugs {First Grade Rocks} and knew that I wanted to make them with my preschool clients.  I spent some of my t.v. viewing time cutting out the parts and used the pieces during drill activities.  It was also fun to use with my older clients-I would ask them to help me make a model for some other clients.  For them I would give them most of the pieces plus a sample of the completed project.  We worked on some Executive Functioning (planning) skills as well as requesting materials needed.  

Hunt-a-rama and a Dork moment.

I love Easter Egg Hunts in therapy.  I love them so much I usually store a whole box of Easter Eggs in my speech room for the whole year.  I don't do more egg hunts during the year.  I suppose I store them in case I am snowed in  until the following Easter.  

Now the "eggs" come in characters and all kind of other designs so it is easier to have a "Treasure Hunt" if you have clients or students who don't celebrate Easter (or if your school doesn't celebrate holidays.)

I've used the Spiderman and Spongebob containers a lot as I have a HUGE caseload of cluster reducer's right now.

 I like the Batman heads.  I'm going to use them in social skills lessons.  The plan is to just take regular social skills cards and make Batman one of the participants.  For example, Batman's friend Jenny just budged in line.  What is Batman thinking?  Open his head and you will find a thought bubble card with a thought like, "Jenny is being really rude.  I wish she'd just go to the end of the line."

Today we worked on vocabulary.  I wrote pairs of objects for compare/contrast and put them in the eggs and hid the eggs around the room.  Then I used the Egg puzzles to write Category/ function/appearance.

We used the Venn Diagrams (I got these at a BER course from Sarah Peterson) to compare and contrast the items using the category /function/object.

At the end, we turned over each piece of the egg to help us summarize the description.  

Now for my super dork moment.  I was explaining the activity to a parent.  I meant to say, The activity was really fun."  Instead, I said, "Yeah, I'm really fun.  Oh.  I mean not usually.  But this was pretty fun."  Have you said things to parents that you regret?  

Still hopping along...Easter Egg puzzles.

Thank you SO much to everyone who participated in the blog hop last week.  I hope you had a really good time and were able to find some new blogs to read.  Even though the blog hop is over, I'm still hopping because it's Easter week and I ended up with lots of activities for my clients.

This is one of my take home projects for my older clients this week.

I found these foam egg shapes at Target for 5.00 for a big pack of eggs.  I'm sure they will be really cheap on Monday if you want to stock up for next year.  (I always think that this is a good idea-but I rarely remember to pull out the activities the next year.)

I used it to work on emotions today.  We came up with vocabulary for small emotions and medium emotions.  We talked about how medium emotions are when we need to pick a calming strategy or get help-BEFORE we get to the big emotions at the bottom of the egg.  If I was the MOST AWESOME Speech Language Pathologist in the Whole. Wide. World., we would have used actual eggs to demonstrate this:

Small emotions: Tap egg and see tiny cracks
Medium Emotions; Tap egg and get bigger crack-maybe some yolk starts to spill out...
Big Emotions: Throw the egg on your Therapy floor.  Discuss what a mess it makes and correlate that to how big emotions create big, messy problems in your life just like this egg did.

(Then picture me, unemployed, wiping egg gunk off of the floor...)

Other ideas I had for the eggs:
1.  Categories: Write three category members on the three parts of the egg.  Put 5-10 "eggs" in a box.  Can they sort the eggs correctly AND name the category?
2.  What does not belong Categories.
3.  Three Step Sequencing:  Write out one step on each piece.
4.  Articulation: silly sentences.  Have the student think of three words that contain their sound.  Write on each piece.  Can they think of sentence that contains all three words?
5.  Vocabulary Definitions: Make the top part a Category, the middle part a function, and the bottom part a synonym.  Have students fill out for different vocabulary items.

What are you doing to celebrate Easter (or Spring) in your Speech sessions?

A Social Skills Game worth checking out.

Sometimes it can be challenging to work on Social Skills with older children who are diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorders.  Finding materials that are motivating and provide the right amount of challenge can be difficult.  Most students I work with can answer questions related to basic social skills.  Should Johnny yell at the teacher?  Of course not.  They have more difficulty with questions where they may not be one right or wrong answer.

Joel Shaul's website: AutismTeachingStrategies.com has a plethora of treatment ideas, freebies and products for purchase.  I've used the free parts of his Green Zone for conversational topic choices and found that my students were able to grasp these concepts quickly.

RYUU-The Game® is a card game similar to Pokemon® or Yu-Gi-Oh.  It was created by Joel Shaul and Rebecca Klaw.  It's a brilliant idea.  It combines dragons-(awesome) with a "role playing" type of game.  The version I played, the student had to answer 2 questions to evolve his dragon.  Each dragon evolves through stages as they become more socially aware.  There are pages of insightful questions and role plays provided on the accompanying CD.  
 

I love this product because it gets kids REALLY excited about thinking about Social Skills.  And it takes the initial pressure off of them to succeed because they are answering questions for their DRAGONS.

March 2013 SLP Blog Link Up

Oh How Pintearesting is hosting a SLP blog Link up party.  Find out how you can join on her site!  

Graphics are by Scrappin Doodles and Teaching in a Small Town. Font is by Cara Carroll of the First Grade Parade.

State of Mind:  Grateful.  I was lucky to be able to participate in the SLP Spring Fever Blog hop this week.  Not only did I get 12 sets of  FREEBIES but I have gotten to meet some fantastically talented Speech Language Pathologists.  AND I'm always so grateful to the people who take time to like my Facebook page, read a blog post or two and support SLP's by making purchases on TPT.  

Loving:  I started canning my salads after reading about it on Pinterest.  It's great because I can make up 3-4 lunches on the weekend and be able to take them to work and eat healthy most of the time.  Each week I try a different salad recipe so that I don't get bored of salads.  The best salad so far has been a combination of baby Kale leaves and Makoto ginger dressing (available in the refrigerated section)  I realize that choosing baby Kale over my family or a homemade salted caramels is ridiculous.  If you want to send me a box of homemade caramels I promise that will be what I'm loving.  (Please don't send me your family...)  

Prepping:  I'm working on a new TPT product that focuses on  sequencing.  And I'm prepping Spring Into Spring with Verbal Problem Solving From SLPforME.  I'm always looking for some good resources for Problem Solving. 

Ready to get started?

Petting Zoo: A versatile app I didn't get anything to talk about...

I love it when you find a mainstream app that you can adapt and use in therapy sessions.  Last week, I found an app called "Petting Zoo."  This is an app I paid for and I don't get any compensation for this review.  It's just a really cool activity!

The app contains over 20 line drawings of different animals.  But the cool thing about this app is the interactivity of it.  The animals change based on 5 different ways you touch the screen.

• Swipe left
• Swipe right
• Swipe down
• Swipe up
• Tap on animal

It's almost worth it just to work on those concepts.  You could ask your clients, "What are you going to do?" and they could respond using the language above.  

Here is how we used it in therapy:

Naming: 

Verb Vocabulary:  

Because each character changes 5 times, it allows you to really target a variety of verbs.  This is a great activity for older children as they are challenged to explain what happened when they did a particular action.  

Complex Sentences:  

I have a lot of clients who need to work on creating more complex sentences.  For this activity, I gave students a visual that they could use to create their sentences:  

Answering Questions:  

It's easy to target a variety of questions including: 

• Where is it?
• What animal is it?
• What happened?
• What did you do?  

Predicting:  

As my clients got more familiar with the activity, we started to work on predicting.  What do you think will happen, what will the elephant do, what do you want it to do.  

I'm interested-What are your favorite non-speech discipline apps to use in therapy?  

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!