Wednesday Swap with All Y'all Need

I'm excited to be doing a product swap with Laura from All Y'all Need.  All Y'all Need is a collaborative blog written by Amy (the Librarian), Laura (the Speech Language Pathologist) and Lisa (the Teacher)  Their names make up the All in Ya'll Need.  Laura works tirelessly to connect us bloggers with her great Monthly link ups.  And she is a great person to follow on Instagram-even if her food pictures make me SO hungry.

Laura sent me a copy of one of her new Products:  Autumn: Write and Say the Room.

I'm live in Anoka which is the self-proclaimed Halloween Capital of the World.  So I'm all over Fall and Halloween types of Activities.  

Pictures are provided for you to place around your therapy room.  Students find the pictures and write them down on graphic organizers that are provided with the product.  The pictures are cute and clearly represent the targeted words which makes it easy to focus on productions with and without a verbal model.  

Autumn write and Say the room comes with approximately 10-15 pictured targets for the each of the following sounds: 

• /k/ and /g/
• l/
• /r/
• /s/ and /z/
• /f/ and /v/
• "CH", "SH" and "TH" 

I love that it would be easy and quick to set up.  I'm a huge fan of anything that gets kids moving so I love the fact that they can get up and move around the room.  Plus adding in the writing aspect is great for literacy.

I think it could be really fun to hide them in unique places and work on expressive concepts as well.  Ex. I found the Turkey under the table.  (and I mean UNDER-as in taped on the bottom of the table.)  It's pretty colorful so this product might use up a fair amount of ink.  This is one I would try to print at work.  

You can find more about Laura at her blog: 

Facebook:

Teacher's Pay Teachers store.  

Instagram

Laura has generously offered a copy of Autumn Write and Say to one of Speech 2U's readers.

a Rafflecopter giveaway


Disclosure Statement: I received a copy of Autumn Write and Say for free to complete this review.  However, the opinions are my own.   

Mama-on-Days: Managing Mealtime Planning or it's time to stop with the mac and cheese already...

Does anyone else find that the changing of the seasons is a good time to start reorganizing your life?   One of my continual struggles is scheduling family mealtimes, providing healthy whole food options and not spending my whole weekend grocery shopping.  I WANT to be the family that sits down together at the dinner table.  But sometimes, I WANT to just relax for a little bit once I'm home and do some internet browsing, facebook reading or just plain old, glorious couch sitting.  The two don't really work together.

My challenge for this week was to organize my grocery shopping and mealtime planning.

There are a variety of different templates for meal planning. Fab-n-Free had a ton of free resources listed on their site.  The Project Girl also has really cute free printables for meal planning. 

I work 10 hour days, so by the time I pick up my son at Daycare and get home we are at the witching hour of crazy kid behavior (Even more so now that he is in the no-nap room.)  My husband is an illustrator who works at home-so I wanted a sheet which let me write up what the menu plan was as well as listing a few prep suggestions for him to do before we get home. 

Here is what I ended up with. 

Hopefully I will be motivated by the Cute Chevron design.

Do you find meal planning to be challenging?  My mealtime organizer is available as free download in color and black and white versions.  Just click on one of the pictures below to download.

Next week's challenge?  Mastering the art of Grocery shopping (well, mastering might be stretching it a little bit.) 

Back to School Get to Know you Backpacks: A fantastic purchased craftivity

I purchased the pattern for this activity from Brooke Hildebrand on Teacher's Pay Teachers during the big Back To School Sale.  Brooke is also the author of the blog Once Upon a First Grade Adventure.

I made this with almost all of my kids this week.  This product comes with the templates, which I cut out while binge watching Breaking Bad at home over the weekend.  That way, I could make sure that we were maximizing our time in therapy.

I started by having each kid fill out the "All about me" page.  For a lot of my kids, I helped them write it so we could save time.  This was a great way to work on WH questions as well as participating in a "Get to know you" activity. For instance, I never would have guessed that one of my clients would have answered "sardines" as his favorite food.

 I had my social language clients (who know me) try to fill out the template for me.  It was pretty hilarious.  My age ranged from 20-70 and my favorite thing is NOT going to Speech.  We talked about how some of this information was good for our Friend Files.  Friend Files is a concept created by Michelle Garcia Winner.  Jill Kuzma has some great visuals you can use to help teach this skill to your kids.  

We also worked on directions and basic concepts: 

• Put the red snap UNDER the blue page
• Put the hook ON top of the bag
• Put the straps next to your information page.  

I had cut out worksheets or pictures targeting each clients therapy goals and placed them in the backpack.  After we were done making the backpack, we put these cards in the backpack to practice our skills or to send home as a home program.  

Disclaimer Statement: I did not receive any payment or free copy of the above activity.  I just really liked it and wanted to share it with you!  

If you liked this activity, you can find more about Brooke:

Blog

Teacher's Pay Teachers

I hope you liked this post!  Please consider sharing this post of Facebook or Pinterest below!  

Where in the World is Speech2u? Guest Posting over at Cooking Up Good Speech

Hey Everyone!  I'm Guest Posting today over at Cooking Up Good Speech to celebrate her 2 year Blogiversary.  Cooking Up Good Speech is a fantastic blog with great ideas for incorporating speech therapy in the kitchen.

Head over there and check out how I structure my feeding sessions around different food textures and consistencies.  And you can learn about my love of Kale.

The Animals on the Bus-an okay therapy activity

I'm always excited when you see a speech therapy post where a blogger does some amazing craftivity.  I love crafts.  Today and tomorrow I'm going to show you two crafts I made for back to school week.  This should be a feel good post for most people.  Because you will feel good when you see what kind of craft I come up with when left to my own devices.

I saw these yellow foam die cuts at Target's dollar spot and thought they would be a fun back to school activity for my younger kiddoes.  I thought I'd have some flash of inspiration or spend a night on Pinterest finding fantastic ways to use them.

Or, I would put them in a drawer and forget about them until the day I wanted to use them and then scramble around trying to form some great activity with them.  It could've been cool to take pictures of the kids and put them in the bus with some type of bus fingerplay.  Or do a wheels on the bus theme with Boardmaker PCS symbols for the different parts of the song.  BUT when it came time to use it, the only thing I had close by was some stickers.  

We have a big box of cut up stickers for prizes, I scrounged through them-found some pretty inappropriate skull and busty superhero lady ones that I discarded of quickly.  I ended up finding some animal stickers.

I put the animal stickers out on the table and let the kids name the animals they wanted.  Then they put them on the bus while practicing their animal noises.  We ended our session with a rousing version of "The animals on the bus go Meow, meow, meow."  Although I had to get creative with the penguin and hamster noises.

How would you use the bus die cuts in therapy?  I'd love to hear about it!

Guess what? I tricked another client into doing a lot of articulation repetitions...Bwahahahahaha.....

I've heard somewhere that you need over 10,000 correct repetitions before a sound can be generalized.  Someday I'm going to put this to the test-and try a 24 hour speech marathon with a kid.  I'd get shirts and sponsors and protein bars like I'm running a real marathon.  Although the training for it would probably kill me.  

Most of my clients are masters of distraction, so I love it when I get an activity where I can "trick" them into more repetitions.  

Last week I was playing LiveLoveSpeech's TH and Attributes Superheros game.  I love the graphics on this and how you can used it to focus on articulation AND attributes.

I had put the TH cards in a Spiderman bucket I got for the Biscuit one year for Easter.  Everything seems more fun when you are pulling cards out of a superhero head.

A lot of TPT products (mine included) have extra BONUS cards (ex. lose a turn/lost your cards/take an extra turn)  

One time I was playing a Speech Room New's Ice Cream Truck Conditional Directions game with a client.  He kept getting the "Sun melted your Snack cards"  which meant he had to put all of his cards away.  He was cracking up.  The next session we had, he was asking if we could play the game again and then told me he had been playing it with his brother at dinner every night.  He didn't have any of the cards.  I wish I could've been a fly on his wall to see how he "played" this game at home.  

Sometimes I will use a few of the BONUS cards and set the rest aside so that we can get a rhythm going with the game.  Today I threw all of LiveLoveSpeech's BONUS take an extra turn cards into the Spiderman bucket.  Take an extra turn cards are brilliant.  Especially in one on one settings.  As long as you make sure you don't get them.  

There are cute little shield cards with numbers on them that come with this game and we put those face down on the table.   On their turn they turned over a card and had a number written on it.  That was the number of cards they they had to pull from the Spiderman bucket.  

The first draw was 5 and ended up with 3 take another turn cards.  He ended up picking take another turn cards almost every turn. I pretended to be very upset-and complained about how it wasn't fair that he was getting ALL of the turns and I didn't get any turns.  I talked about how I was really good at saying the TH sound and that if he wasn't such a good card picker I'd be winning.   

He was SO excited to be beating me that he completely forgot about the fact that he was saying his speech sounds (but he didn't forget SO much that he was saying them incorrectly.)  Have you ever tricked a kiddo into doing more than they would like?  

Mama-On-Days: Nostalgia Mishmash and the One that got Away

I realized last week that next year (phew!) I will be celebrating my 20th COLLEGE reunion.  It's funny how quickly time passes. Should I still have questions about what I am doing in Speech therapy and still thinking about how I can be the most effective for my clients?   I think one of the challenges is staying open to new ideas, new approaches and new activities.   The best therapist's I've met continue to question as they get more experienced in the field.

The other big milestone in September is that my son will be turning 5.  That means next year he will be going to Kindergarten.  I can't believe how quickly he is growing up.  We just quarterly daycare report card.  On a 5 point scale, he is at 3's and 4s (average to slightly above) on his play and academic skills.  And at some 2-3's for listening skills.  So I've got a year to help him grow in this area.  I think I might try some type of martial arts program to help him harness his energy in a more constructive way.  Has anyone tried this?

Anyhow, with all of these milestones, I've been feeling a little nostalgic for some of my old toys.  In the hopes of avoiding the Ebay splurge, I thought I'd write about my five favorite childhood toys and one of my favorite therapy toys that is no longer produced.  I'm stretching a little-my challenge is NOT to spend 100's of dollars trying to recreate my youth.

5.  Fisher Price City:

I collect some of the Vintage Fisher price sets (I have the Sesame Street house and the brown house.)  I loved this set growing up-especially the mail car and the fact that you could put mail into each of the door's slits and the crossing bridge with the stop light.  The new Fisher Price sets are cute-but I wonder if they still encourage the same amount of creativity.  Part of the beauty of the old FP sets is the lack of detail of the figures (round ball on rounded square body) allowed you to pretend the figures were just about anything.  I'm seeing more and more character driven sets (Super heros/princesses) which seem to limit play even more to more "movie retell.

2.  Treetots Treehouse:

My cousins had this house.  I loved that it was set in a tree house and that the dog's house was located in a little bush that you could close.  I had the taller Sunshine Family dolls.  But then my dad took away the man doll because he didn't think it was appropriate for me to play with a male doll.  The 70's were a weird time I guess.  Which just meant that I cut off the hair on my Barbies and turned their heads backwards to make the "boyfriend."  

3.  Paper Dolls

I used to get these at the drug store.  They came in a box and each Gingham girl had coordinated color clothing.  LOVED to play with these.

4.  Sunshine Family Dolls:

I had the taller Sunshine Family dolls.  But then my dad took away the man doll because he didn't think it was appropriate for me to play with a male doll.  The 70's were a weird time I guess.  Which just meant that I cut off the hair on my Barbies and turned their heads backwards to make the "boyfriend." In retrospect, these dolls are a little creepy.  I think I yearn for them since they were "forbidden fruit."

5.  PrestoMagix: Dry Transfer Games.

These probably came around before they knew how to make stickers so cheaply.  I remember them having character sets too.  Each set came with a colored scene and the transfer sheets.  You'd put them on the scene and use a wooden stick to scratch the back and transfer it onto the scene.  I wish they still had these as they seem like really good activities for plane rides.

AND THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY: Discovery Toys Stack & Pop.

I don't have a picture for this toy-it was really simple-it looked like a ring stacker.  You had 5 foam disks that you would stack onto a white and blue "launcher" Once you had them all stacked on, there was a little white lever that you could press to make the disks "pop up."  It was great to work on initial language with clients.  I could get lots of repetitions in between placing disks on the "launcher."  I bought three of these when they were closing them out and the last one just died.

What are your favorite childhood toys-or what is the therapy item that GOT away from you?

Next week's challenge?  Organizing my families meals and shopping.