Flashcard Eating Monsters!

I have a couple of monsters in the speech room today! I found these precious snack cups over the weekend and bought them for my 16 month old to eat his snacks out of. Unfortunately, the silicone teeth are pretty tough and once my son stuck his hand in, he was not able to pull it back out! But of course I see opportunities for speech games in everything so instead of returning these monster cups, I brought them to live in the speech room where they can feast on Webber cards instead of my son's hand.

Here is how we played this game:

1. Stuff each monster cup with flashcards
2. Tell the students "Oh no! Monsters moved into the speech room and are eating your practice cards! Carefully pull one card out at a time and say your words as you go. If you do it very carefully, the monsters won't notice and they won't bite your hand".

My students loved the monsters! It was a quick and easy way to make regular old flashcard drills fun.

5W's Nonfiction Story Cards: Product Review

I am always looking for good listening comprehension activities for my students. Of course, I love reading books with them and asking comprehension questions but sometimes I don't want a whole book. Sometimes I just want a little passage with a few questions. Short passages mean I can get through several mini stories in one session or use them in RtI groups. At the beginning of the year I ordered 5W's Nonfiction Story Cards and so far I absolutely love them! 

The package comes with 20 different nonfiction stories with 3 copies of each story inside so you can pass them out and students can follow along as you read. Each story also has 5 WH questions to check for comprehension and 5 additional questions on the back targeting main idea, vocabulary, and identifying facts vs. opinions. 

One of my favorite things about these cards are the "find out more" questions. Each story has a question that requires the students to do some research of their own. For example, one of the stories is about a hippo and the "find out more" question is "How do hippos keep from getting sunburned?". This is a great opportunity to target predicting and reasoning skills. My students use the iPad to look up answers to these questions after everyone has shared their predictions. 

I have had such a great experience with these cards that I am ordering the fiction version too!

If anyone else has a listening comprehension activity that they are loving this year, tell me about it in the comments! 

When SLPs lose their voice...

What do you do if you are an SLP but you can't talk?! 

Working with kids in a public school, I knew it would only be a matter of time before I caught something. This year, it took five weeks. I got a little cold on Wednesday and by Thursday morning my voice was GONE. I put myself on vocal rest. I didn't feel bad enough to take a sick day. I had lots to do at work. I just couldn't talk!

But what about therapy? What about meetings? How does a school based SLP go about her day and do her job when she can't talk?

It caught me by surprise. I hadn't been talking too much. I wasn't that sick. I don't usually get so hoarse with a cold. So I had to scrap the lesson plans for the day and come up with something I could do with the kids that didn't involve much talking but still targeted their objectives.

While I was thinking of what to do, I wrote this message on my white board:

"Oh No! Mrs. Avren lost her  voice! We will be doing a quiet craft today"

I pulled out my stack of magazines, some scissors, glue, and construction paper. I decided I would have students cut out pictures of things that had their speech sound and take their projects home for weekend speech sound practice with their parents. 

I modified the activity slightly for the students with language goals. Some of them wrote down adjectives to describe their pictures. Some of them said a sentence about each picture using past tense verbs. My fluency students made sentences about each picture using easy onset. 

(note: The students that just couldn't do this activity were penciled in for make-up sessions next week)

I quickly typed up a little cover sheet and made an example for the kids to look at: 

Fortunately, I had just purchased a bunch of little dry erase boards at the Target dollar spot! I carried one of these around all day to communicate. (I was going to download an AAC device to my iPad and use it just for fun but I didn't have time!) 

However, many of my students cannot read. So, I used a lot of nonverbal communication as well. :) 

Overall, things went pretty smoothly! The kids loved the craft. 

I did have two IEP meetings, but I typed up a bunch of information before hand for the general education teacher to say for me as we discussed speech present levels and goals. 

I drank tea with honey throughout the day and plan on getting a lot of rest this weekend! 

#InstaSLP (and another freebie!)

I just joined the world of instagram and am having fun linking up with other SLPs and seeing their pictures! Speech Room News and Crazy Speech World created the #InstaSLP event this week and it has been great to see other speech rooms, activities, and crafts. Here are a few of my pics from this week:

This week I have been reading The Gruffalo with my students and matching up the rhyming words. I made some activities to accompany the book including a writing activity, a coloring activity, a following directions activity, and a rhyming match-up! These activities are FREE in my TPT store.