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
No comments:
Post a Comment