SLP Spring Fever Blog Hop: Welcoming the Cherry Blossoms

Welcome to the SLP Spring Fever Blog Hop! 

You will get the chance win prizes and get freebies by touring 12 fantastic blogs. Here is the lineup: 

1. Figuratively Speeching SLP
2. Just Wright Speech
3. Queen's Speech
4. Putting Words in your Mouth
5. Straight Up Speech
6. The Speech Umbrella
7. Miss Thrifty SLP
8. Rae's Speech Spot
9. Speech2U
10. Word to the Wise
11. Let's Talk Speech Language Pathology
12. SLP for Me – guest posting on Figuratively Speeching SLP

12 winners will receive a goodie basket of one Spring-themed activity from each participating blog owner/page owner in the blog hop.A grand prize winner will receive the following in addition to the activities:Codes for 3 Hamaguchi Apps (see Figuratively Speeching SLP’s reviews)A code for a Mobile Ed App (undetermined at the moment)4 songs from musictherapytunes.com A green Big Grips iPad 2 case

Now, on to a little bit about the freebie I created.....I have been fascinated by Japanese culture since 6th grade (yes, I used to watch anime for those of you in the 20-30 year old crowd) and studied some of its history in college. My favorite images of Japan come from the beautiful spring blossoms of the cherry trees. In 1912, the Japan sent 3,020 cherry tress to America as a sign of friendship that we continue to celebrate today in spite of WWII. It amazes me. I want to share that amazement with my students by introducing them to D.C.'s Cherry Blossom Festival. The freebie includes a little bit of history for reading comprehension, synonyms, and pronouns. Be sure to look for a little green frog and his very special message in the download!

Grab your copy of Language Blossoms here. I hope you and your students will enjoy it!

The rules of the contest are simple: You must decode a secret message. In order to complete this task, you will need to visit each of the 12 blogs and download a freebie. The freebie will contain a word that is part of the code. When you enter the contest through rafflecopter, you will be asked to type in the secret code. Have fun and enjoy blog hopping with us! The contest will run from March 17th  to March 23.

Fixing sentences...

My motto for this week is "just keep swimming." The IEP load will eventually lighten up now that the 3/15 curfew for April 1st headcount is upon us in my district. I don't know if headcounts are something that all districts do or not, but it's a pretty big deal around here. We've all been scrambling and the NC DPI made it just a teeny bit worse by deciding to mandate speech therapists giving parents evaluation reports at the evaluation meeting. I will admit that evaluation reports are probably the bane of my paperwork existence. It's very repetitive because all of my information is already in the evaluation form (DEC 3). In the past, I had been doing this step after the meeting so I could get the official diagnosis on the form. That's definitely not going to work anymore. I guess this post is a symbol of my morning and attempt at moving out of the denial stage. 

In the meanwhile, I created a small photo album of words that are out of order. The students have to figure out how to fix the sentences. 

Opposites DIY

You may have seen my pronoun notebooks. If not, I would like to introduce you to the wonderful possibilities of magazines & sales ads. I spend an hour or two each weekend cutting out pictures that I like from them and newspapers. I mainly use the pictures to create notebooks that target various skills, but you can use them for following directions or art projects as well.

Here are a few pictures from my giant book of opposites (1 page to introduce and 5 pages of opposites). 

Here are a few pictures from my book of feelings too.

Hats off to a world of possibilities....

I spotted these great little hats at Dollar Tree this past weekend in their summer section. My mind was instantly filled with all the possibilities they hold.

A blank canvas.

The cards you see in my pictures are for wh- questions. I just wrote the words on colored note cards and tape them on the hats based on the task. The colored note cards are a great way to keep each task set separate rather than shuffling through a bunch of plain cards. I've made a pronoun set in addition to the wh- cards so far. 

My plans for the hats are twofold. I can use them for safari hunts around my room or the hallways for target cards. I can also use them to assign a specific word for each student. The one who gets the who hat has to answer my who questions for that round. It can easily be turned into a game of "musical hats."

Egg-tastic!

Tomorrow is a teacher workday. Yay! I'm looking forward to getting caught up with my Medicaid billing, plans of care, and evaluation reports. The chance of me getting everything accomplished is not terribly high, but at least I can get a good chunk of this stuff done. It also gives me time to recover from the wildness of the week. I guess my students have spring fever because their behavior has been extremely chaotic this week. I ended up having to take out pom-poms from my "Kiss Your Brain" jar. They just managed to get within 3 pom-poms of having it full too. (When it's full, I let every student go to the prize box.) 

My biggest excitement came from another "surprise" transfer student who's 90 day timeline for initial placement is almost up. An hour of testing, 45 minutes of trying to figure out what happened to previous bilingual testing results, and quite a bit of stress-eating later the assessment crisis was over.*Whew* All I can say is that it is a serious blessing when staff at the previous school is thoughtful enough to let us (the ENTIRE team) know about transfers in the middle of the referral process. I wish it happened more often and thank you to those of you who do respect the sanity of your fellow SLPs. 

The best news for today comes from the fact that I finally finished one of my Easter-related ideas. Egg-tastic! is something I created for my 3-5 grade groups. It has some social skills activities, categorization tasks, and sentence ordering tasks. As always, you can grab of copy of it here. 

P.S. The Dabbling Speechie has a really great idea on her blog for reminding articulation students to pay attention to their sound production with thought bubbles. You can easily adapt this visual cue for language activities as well, such as making a set for pronouns or smileys for sentence formulation. I prepared my articulation set today and am just waiting to get them laminated.

We're going on a safari!

The cold weather has definitely made my mind wonder to the joyous thoughts of summer (when I will probably complain about the heat wave). It also makes me realize that the school year is rapidly coming to a close with lots of IEP meetings until the bitter end. I am switching over to "survival-mode" mindset and activities that can be pulled out for quick reviews. 

One of my biggest targets this entire year is wh- question words and how to answer these questions. It's a goal that goes from kindergarten to 5th grade with lots of variety. However, I stress the importance of my students knowing the specific meaning of those wh- words. We use my story recall rope to review the meaning of every wh- word at least once a week. We practice with expo markers, dice, flower spinner, etc....The only thing I haven't really done is use actual paper materials for this goal. I decided to make a quick sorting activity for these words that uses either pictures or actual word cards. I also made an alphabet letter hunt for my kindergarten students to search for around my room. You can get your copy of the activities here.

In terms of colorful semantics, I am using a set of three Mad-Lib type activity books that I picked up at Walmart recently. I like that each story requires the student to think of words to use before they see the story. We reviewed the parts of speech as they picked out words to use. (The Zany Tale books also do wonderful in the copier which can be trickier than you'd think.) The best part is that my students get to laugh at how strange the stories turn out and we can talk about ways to make them sound more realistic. 

In other news, I get to go to Beckman Oral Motor training in two weeks! I've heard great things about the program and am really looking forward to learning the techniques. I think I may need to keep a list of skills that I really want to focus on for the CEU requirements. It's rather overwhelming when you look at ASHA's website (although that could be just me). I'm worried about going to another training that ends up feeling like a huge infomercial. One experience with that through Letterland was enough. At the top of my list are: Hanen Program, something for the phonological cycles approach, and auditory-verbal techniques.

Lucky Leprechauns! March is finally here :)

March is my favorite month out of the year. I love spring weather and it usually starts up around here towards the end of March. I'm also a huge nerd when it comes to British and Irish history. I love learning about old English, all of the folktales, and dream of  eventually visiting the United Kingdom. 

The only thing that I don't like about March is finding books to use for therapy. In graduate school, I used Gail Gibbons book about St. Patrick's day at my school placement. Gibbons writes books that are very informative, but they don't always go over so well in therapy sessions. The St. Patrick's day book is one of the not so great ones. It works for 4-5th grade. The little ones just had the tendency to tune the story out. 

This year, I found one that is more to the level that all of my students can enjoy. It's called the Luckiest Leprechaun and is a great book about friendship. 

The friendship is an unlikely one, a grumpy Leprechaun and a happy-go-lucky dog, from the start. The plot follows how Lucky is able to prove herself to Mac by rescuing him (and, more importantly, his gold) from Professor Chester. You can use it to address social skills (Why does Lucky want to be friends with Mac when he's mean to her? Would you want a friend to treat you like that?), comprehension, and sequencing of events.

I've made a book companion of sorts to go along with this story. The majority of the packet can be used with anything. It's only the wh- section that is book specific. You can get your copy here.

Have a wonderful weekend!