2013 is off with a bang....

It's the first full week back after the long Christmas holiday. This year has certainly gotten started off on an extremely busy foot. We've had two student transfers (one of which I had to re-evaluate immediately), introducing another student into therapy,  testing two students for re-evaluation (one of which I get to do tomorrow), screening a student from SST, writing several IEPs, and seeing another one of my students "graduate."  I love the dynamics of my job, but I'm pretty sure that this weekend will be spent sleeping.

To coordinate with this tornado of a week, I had all of my groups (asides from the inclusion ones) play "following directions" Twister. I wrote some basic two-step directions using before and after on note cards. I taped the note cards to random spots on the Twister mat and left 1 free space in each row. Even my kindergartners were laughing by the end of the game. It's also a good way to teach the concepts of "left" and "right." Honestly, I think it's pretty much impossible to go wrong with this game. You can tape articulation cards, vocabulary words, letters, sight words, etc to the mat.

We're reading snow-themed books this week. My older kids got to enjoy Snowflake Bentley, which is one of the few non-fiction books I've used so far in my sessions. I'm trying to broaden my therapy horizons as exposure to all types of text is a huge aspect of Common Core.

When I was a student, I observed our district's lead SLP using this book during one of her weekly sessions. It took all of three years to find a copy at Goodwill. The story is about a farmer from Vermont who loved snow. He wanted to share his love of snow to the world through the hard wrought effort of taking pictures of individual snowflakes. The ending is sad. I'm not going to lie. It mentions how he died after walking 6 miles through a snowstorm. Paper snowflakes are a great craft to incorporate with this story. However, I didn't incorporate a craft this week as I had the Twister game.

My younger students looked at an arctic themed book.

I love the pictures in this book. They drew my first graders in and held their attention.