Four Fun Free Valentine Activities!

Love is in the air! I am going to start Valentine activities with my students on January 27th and I can hardly wait! I wanted to share some of the activities I have planned.

First off - CHALLENGES! You all know how much I love my Peachie Speechie Articulation Challenges. They are so motivating to the students. I love hearing them talk about how they want to practice more so they can get to 100 productions. I have created two Valentine challenges:

1. Valentine M&M Challenge - Have students fill up their challenge mats with pink, red, and white Valentine M&Ms! They can earn one M&M for each production.

2. Valentine Heart Challenge - You can use the conversation heart candies for this one OR mini conversation heart erasers from the Target Dollar Spot! (less sugar, still motivating!) Of course you can use the black and white pages with markers and have them color the hearts as they go as well.

I am also reading quite a few Valentine books to my students this year. Kristin over at Simply Speech recently posted a great list of Valentine books as well. I have created activities to go with my two favorite Valentine books - The Day it Rained Hearts and Love Monster.

3. The Day It Rained Hearts by Felicia Bond is a simple, sweet, story. I created a couple of simple activity pages to go along with it. These activity pages can be used for pretty much any learning target. I have updated this activity in my TPT store so if you downloaded it last year I suggest re-downloading it. Activities to accompany this story include a Valentine Tree craft, a creative writing page, and a page for making it rain hearts (stamp a heart/stick a heart sticker every time you say your sound!)

4. Love Monster. Oh, how I love this Love Monster Book. I actually wrote a whole post about it already so I will just say this book is great and you should totally read it to your students and download my free activities to accompany it. You will be glad you did. <3

Love Monster

The book Love Monster by Rachel Bright is just wonderful. The story follows a lonely monster throughout his search for a companion. He searches high and low and almost gives up. But when he least expects it, love finds him. The moment I saw this book at Barnes and Noble I knew I had to have it. Just look at that little monster face on the cover!

Naturally, I wanted to share this book with all of my students so I created a few activities to go along with the story. You can download them for free in my TPT store. The download includes:

1. Graphic Organizer (Beginning-Middle-End)
2. Articulation Practice Sheet
3. Create a Love Monster Craftivity Template
4. Love Monster Creative Writing Page

I think the craftivity is my favorite. I made a template/outline of a monster and the students can use paint, markers, glitter, sequins, paper, stickers- anything! - to create a Love Monster of their own! 

After I used a picture collage app to show the sequence of events (and range of emotions) in the book Winter is for Snow, my students have been begging to do that again. So, we took pictures of the Love Monster book and discussed how the little monster's feelings changed throughout the story. The pic collage app is a quick, easy, and motivating way to do this. 

So, get your hands on a copy of this super loveable book and read it this Valentine's Day! <3 

Winter is for Snow

Even though the temperature s in the 50's here in Georgia, I am going with a winter/snow theme in my speech room this month. We have been reading books about winter weather and decorating the speech room with snowflakes.

One of my favorite books we have read is Winter is for Snow by Robert Neubecker. It is a great book for discussing feelings and perspective taking. In the story, a little boy is delighted to see that it is snowing outside. His little sister is not as enthusiastic and states that she would rather stay inside and watch television. However, by the end of the story, she is having a blast in the winter weather.

After reading this book to my students, I had them complete a graphic organizer to illustrate how the little girl feels at the beginning, middle, and end of the story.

(The student's paper here says "She was grouchy. She was curious. She was happy. She loves snow")

We also took pictures of the illustrations in the book that show how the little girl is feeling. We used a picture collage app to show how her feelings change throughout the story:

I planned to make paper snowflakes today as well, but ran out of time. We will just have to do that later in the week! 

If we can't have snow outside, at least we can enjoy winter-themed books and paper snowflakes in the speech room.