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