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