SALE & Teacher's Notebook store

I'm throwing a sale just in time for Cyber Monday and Tuesday!  

 

My entire Teachers Pay Teachers store is 10% off. The enter promo code "cyber" to receive an additional 28% discount. Visit my store here!

If you're more comfortable with Teacher's Notebook, you're in luck! I just uploaded all my materials at the same price to TN and am also throwing a 10% off sale, Monday and Tuesday! Check out their sale:

Visit my Teacher's Notebook shop here. 
Happy shopping!

Diana

A Christmas Auditory Miracle

Happy post-turkey coma day (because I refuse to give in to Black Friday madness)!

'Tis the season for many holidays, but today we will start with a Christmas activity. This packet targets various listening skills. In it we have:

24 (each) wh-questions

16 "how" questions

24 (each) 1, 2 & 3 step directions
24 conditional directions - with & without temporal concepts

24 absurd sentences

Game board for game play during activities

Blank cards with graphics to create your own auditory tasks

Many of the questions are Christmas and winter themed, but at least half are also general. 

You can find this activity here from Teachers Pay Teachers. Download the "Preview" to a get a freebie with a sampling of the activities in the full packet.

Be sure to come back for the Cyber Monday sale 12/2-3 and my own store sale with an additional 10% off from 11/30-12/3!!

Diana

Articulation Gum Balls

Hey guys,

What a long time between posts!

I'll cut to the chase - this is a major multi-document project that, hopefully, you will enjoy. There are 5 packets of articulation "gum ball" activities with pictures, words and phrases/sentences to elicit production of all sounds in all positions and blends (when applicable). 

The early developing sounds: B, P, M, K, G, F and V are presented in pictures without sentences. As most children working on these sounds are non-readers, pictures are a better way to elicit spontaneous production. S, L and R blends are also included in the packet. "R" words are arranged according to placement (different vocalic as well as prevocalic).

There are (approximately) 950-975 words, 230 pictures and 200 sentences in the MEGA BUNDLE packet! Of course included are blank gum balls to add your own words and sentences. You can, of course, create your own sentences from the target word lists. Since the pictures don't come along with sentences, you will need to create your own or have your students come up with their own.
It comes with a whole-page gum ball machine (use is optional) and "game" gum balls:

Now, here's where you get it:

B, P, M Gum Balls
K, G, F, V Gum Balls
TH Gum Balls (FREE)
SH, CH, J Gum Balls
S, R, L Gum Balls

Articulation MEGA BUNDLE (save $$)

Enjoy and please feel free to leave a comment, suggestion, questions, etc.

Diana

S Bingo Boards

Hey guys,

I can't keep up with all the materials posted on Pinterest and blogs! I'm up to my ears in IEPs and still trying to download, print and laminate all the wonderful activities. 

It's nice to have variety :-) I try to pin everything that is useful for the school aged population. Visit my Pinterest page here and check out my various speech boards (I tried to organize them). Feel free to peruse my other loves: shoes, makeup and cooking!

In the meantime, here's a freebie preview of something I'm working on. My goal is to create bingo boards for all sounds and clusters, but it's time consuming. If anyone has suggestions to speed up the process, I'll be very grateful (enough to give you and some friends the future creations for free!). 

This includes 3 bingo boards and call cards for "S" in all positions. It's fairly open ended: you can have one student call the cards, have students name the item or say a phrase/sentence for every picture that's called... up to you!

Enjoy it here for free!

Diana

Balloon-y Spatial Concepts

I'm trying to churn out more materials to make up for the weeks that I've missed. So today we have a little spatial concepts activity. Grab it for free here.


I believe the best spatial concept activities are live - meaning incorporate it into your play. Building Legos, arranging furniture in a doll house, puzzles... those all use spatial concepts. But you can't always play with all students, and you need materials for centers in the classroom or carryover for home. And we all know, sometimes you need a variety of spatial activities because it takes a while. 

This activity uses balloons as the moveable element. In the expressive portion, the student identifies where the balloon is.

In the receptive portion, the student places the balloon where you indicate.

There is a list of directions, but you can also use your own, targeting specific spatial concept your student(s) need. There's even a "free for all" page:

Enjoy and let me know what concepts you need more work on!

Diana

Grammar Detectives

And now, grammar.

These detectives are searching for correct subject-verb agreement, third person singular, irregular past, irregular plurals and pronouns. That's a lot of detective work :)

First, there are cards with choices for is/are, has/have and third person singular verbs.

Next we target irregular past tense verbs by converting present tense sentences into past. There is a game board to go along with this activity, or you can always use your own. Candy Land goes a long way!

Pronouns can be easy and elusive to target all at once. Included are pictures of a girl, a boy and a group with suggestions to include pictures of yourself and your students to target personal pronouns (me, we, your, etc.). Use pictures of items or include your own items to create subjective, possessive and objective sentences.

The Roll-A-Dice sentence maker is intended for reflexive pronouns - although you can easily use it to form sentences with subjective pronouns as well. Students can create past tense sentences and would therefore be using irregular past tense verbs and the objects of the sentences can be used as irregular plurals. You will probably have to model reflexive sentences to the child.

So if you roll all 1s, your sentence would be: "The boy/He found fish by himself." Feel free to twist this activity around as it suits your students' needs!

You can find this activity on TpT - watch out for follow-up carryover activities. Comment below, let me know what you think of this activity.

Diana

Baseball Multiple Meaning Words

I'm a hockey fan, but I suppose in the spirit of athletics, I'll welcome baseball season as well.

Baseball lends itself to great therapy activities. There are turn taking skills, sequencing, cause and effect... the list goes on and on. For now, I decided to focus on multiple meaning words. There are so many! The idea of a word having multiple definitions completely surprises some children, even if they correctly use the word correctly in multiple ways. Once they get past that with a few examples, I find so many have such a hard time providing an adequate definition. For bat I hear "you know, the bat in baseball and the bat that lives in a cave." Well, yes, that shows me that they have the concept of that word somewhere in there (which may in itself be a goal for some students), but it doesn't show me that they can break down the concept into describable parts.

This activity targets those students who "know" what the 2 different bats are but can't adequately explain it. The skill of being able to define a word allows the child not only to fully understand it, but to also associate it with other concepts. This is a very prevalent, higher-level semantic deficit.

So - you can play along with the game which elicits definitions and sentences to demonstrate contextual use of the definitions. You can simply use the cards for definitions or sentences during another activity. For those whole really struggle with defining the word, you can scale down to having them draw pictures.

Oh, and it's FREE =) Enjoy here and spread the word.

Diana

Synonym Cheat Sheets

Do you have students working on synonyms?

Do you look at their class work and see all those words you told them to toss? You know:

GOOD, BAD, HAPPY...

Then you pull out those synonym cards in your session and they have it! So what gives?

Well, for those students who forget their synonyms, here is the cheat sheet. It's pretty basic for now, just  a few verbs and adjectives for kids to reference when writing or doing other in class activities. I laminated them on a file folder. This way, they can put it up on their desk to minimize distractions and have immediate reference to the words. If you have students without vision difficulties, you can print 2 per page and have it all on one side of the file folder or have half pages that are portable. They are also color coded on each page to match up antonym concepts (such as good and bad).

Find it here for free!

What words would you like to see your students diversify?

Diana

April Shower Categories

Spring in New Jersey, and possibly in the entire country, is starting to be a little haphazard. But now we're going into April, and the "April showers" are a great way to connect weather, seasons and idioms to your speech therapy!

Clouds and raindrops seem to be a great way to organize categories. In my experience, when children work on categories, particularly the basic ones, they also can't read. Or are at a low reading level whether because of low cognition or young age. That's why I made this almost entirely visual:

Here are the cloud categories with pictures and words for readers and non-readers alike.

The raindrops have pictures only. There are 7-8 raindrops for each cloud.

Here's how you use it:
Print and cut out the clouds and raindrops. I am always a fan of cutting along the picture, but I created square/rectangular lines to cut out because, let's face it, "ain't nobody got time for that!"
I also laminated color paper to use as a background. Velco, tape or use your fastener of choice to attach the cloud to the page and the raindrops underneath. Remove the raindrops for divergent categories, or leave the drops and find a matching clouds for convergent categories. You can get the best of both worlds by leaving 3 or so raindrops, find a matching cloud and additional raindrops in the appropriate category.

There are 20 total category clouds and blanks for you to create your own.

And a carryover homework page :) Use words or encourage art. For my little guys, I would ask them to draw a picture and ask the parent or homework helper to write the words underneath.

If your goal is category matching only, then this non-verbal activity is enough. To encourage more expressive language, ask non-readers to identify names of groups. You can provide choices of or withhold the clouds until students correctly identifies the category name. Additionally, ask students to name the items in the raindrops, explain why all the items are in the same category (a higher level activity). For example, all wild animals are in that group because they cannot be tamed or domesticated.
Even more: use the carryover raindrop activity as a description template, perhaps for the items in the categorizing activity.

You can find the FREEBIE here and the full packet here. Enjoy and happy Spring!

Diana

Back to internet basics: quia.com

Happy Tuesday!

I've got just over one week till spring break and everyone is getting antsy. This is the time for very interactive therapy ideas. When playing turn taking board games, memory and Go Fish no longer work, it's time to use technology. For therapists without an iPad - such as myself, sadly - there's Quia for speech.

Quia is a website with games for every, I mean literally every, academic subject. All the free games are available here for all subjects. 

Speech related games include various aspects of semantics - categories, definitions, compare/contrast. It has grammar - irregular tenses, morphological endings, subject-verb agreement. There are wh-comprehension questions, pragmatics and fluency. Then, there's a whole collection of articulation elicitation games. 

Each subcategory has different types of games. Some are pop-up questions that are like quizzes. There's "Challenge Board" which is essentially Jeopardy:

Rags-to-Riches, a version of millionaire with choices:

And Battleship where the student plays against the computer. Every time the student hits the computer's ship, a question or prompt appears:

Quia is great for therapy activities but it also works for carryover at home. An interactive game is more likely to get done than a worksheet. Currently, I don't know of any way to keep track of whether students complete certain tasks, but for that you can simply involve parents/caregivers. 

Here is a list of speech/language Quia pages:

Quia for speech

Quia for vocabulary

Quia for cued speech

Quia for English (browse through to differentiate English class vs. speech therapy activities)

And feel free to type anything into the search bar to find related games. 

Did I miss any? Please leave comments with links!

Diana

My first post!

Hi everyone! My names is Diana and I am a school-based SLP in New Jersey. I absolutely love this new world of blogging and sharing resources, ideas and information between professionals. Stay tuned for materials and ideas; let me know what you would like to see!

As my first attempt at creating my own materials, here are some free templates for data collection. There are three templates from completely open ended to goal/date-specific. Please check it out and spread the word!

Grab it here for free!
Diana