What do you do when it's the week before Christmas break?

It's the last few days before Christmas break and everything is a little bit crazy. The kindergarten classes went on a field trip to watch the Polar Express last week and this week it was Polar Express day. The students and teachers wore their pajamas down a "night-time train track" filled hallway. Santa made his appearance in the afternoon and most hearts were filled with glee. (I say most because one of my students informed him that he had no magic and his workshop was not real.) The first graders focused on Christmas around the world, which left this SLP running around the school hunting for students. The 2-5th graders probably had some sort of activity. It just didn't pop up on my radar.

So with an off-kilter schedule, what is an SLP to do? Well this year, I decided to pull out a book that brings the holiday spirit while addressing some social skills issues at the same time. Grumpy Badger's Christmas is a relatively new find for me that I picked up at a garage sale for .25 cents. It was money well spent. Grumpy Badger doesn't like Christmas. He just wants to go to bed for the winter without any interruptions. However, he cannot escape the Christmas celebration of his neighbors. This book is great for addressing issues such as: emotions, dealing with a grouchy person on Christmas, how to refuse a present politely, apologizing, and forgiving. I combined it with both my story rope for wh- questions and emotion sticks. 

We played emotions memory match. The difference of the shapes seemed to make this game go much smoother than store bought versions that I have tried for vocabulary. 

I also found this wonderful video from the McKay foundation which talks about bullying. It had nothing to do with Christmas, but I loved the facial expressions of the characters in the story. 

I also can't wait to hand out one last homework packet for several of my students. It's for /k, g, and y/.