What's In My Cart! (Link up!)

My shopping cart for the big TpT Sale is full and ready to go! I'm linking up with Speech Room News to show you what's in my cart, and to share a few items of mine you might find helpful!

First up are a couple of my items that I think you might be interested in! I've created bundles for my most popular-selling items.

1.  Community Helpers Bundle (link to purchase here)

My Community Helpers items have been some of my top sellers lately, so I decided to bundle them for a discount! It comes with the following:
1.  Community Helpers PreK Language Pack 
2.  Community Helpers UNO Card game
3.  Tic Tac Trucks:  Firetruck Articulation



The second product you may be interested in is my Open-Ended Games Bundle (link to purchase here).  These games are super fun reinforcers that can be used with any speech/language target.  They are perfect go-to games when you need to quickly grab and go!

This includes the following:
1.  Ready.. Set.. Build! An open-ended building block game:  students collect different building blocks needed to create the designs on their mats!

2.  Build Your Own Superhero:  This is one of my most popular items!  Students get to choose a Superhero mat and collect all the pieces needed for that Superhero's costume.  Or, play with the option where students can build their own superhero from "scratch!" -- they choose exactly what their Superhero gets to look like!

3.  Turtle Power Pizza Party- Build Your Own Pizza Game:  Who doesn't love these turtles? Join them in their love of pizza by picking a pizza mat and collecting all the ingredients necessary to create your pizza!

4.  SUPER open-ended, no print, interactive games!  This is a powerpoint file.  The game is based on a points system.  Click the pictures next to the superhero on each slide to see the number behind it.  Tally up the points at the end, and whoever has the most points, wins!



NOW, onto what's in my cart!  I'm not sure if I'll end up purchasing all of these, but here are my top contenders that I'd really like to purchase!

1.  Interactive Visuals for Guessing Games, Describing, and Inferencing from Speechy Musings

This looks SO amazing for teaching kids how to ask questions when playing guessing games like Hedbanz!

2.  Candy Land Phonology from Speech Room News

I have the Candy Land basic concepts cards from Jenna (my very first TpT purchase!!), and have a little guy who LOVES Candyland that I'd like to get these cards for.


3.  Articulation Cans from Putting Words In Your Mouth by Mia

These look like so much fun-- a great way to spice it up a bit instead of using the same old articulation cards!

4.  Tackling Apraxia (also from Mia)

These graphics just look too cute not to purchase, and being in preschool, I have PLENTY of kids that could use these activities (not just kids with apraxia!)

5.  Things That Go! Quick Drill (annnnd also from Mia! Can you tell I love her materials??)

My kids love the other quick drill sets I have of hers, and they are SO easy to just grab and go when I haven't had time to plan and need a fun activity.



There are so many great materials out there-- What are you purchasing for the big sale?? My store will be 20% off, and use code TPT3 to get a total of 28% off your purchase!

Community Helpers Day 2: Firefighters

A second occupation we focused on during Community Helpers Week was firefighters.  I think it's safe to say most little boys think firefighters/firetrucks are the coolest, so my kids especially loved these activities!

First up, we read Clifford the Firehouse Dog and worked on answering WH questions!

With my artic kids, we played my Tic Tac Trucks game.  We used the Chipper Chat tokens to cover the pictures & the "magic wand" to pick them up.  Some of the older kids got the concept of Tic-Tac-Toe, but for a lot of others, they were perfectly content just to try to cover all the pictures on the board! It worked out just fine both ways! :)

 We also used an app called "Fire Rescue" -- it's $1.99 in the App store, and well worth the $2, in my opinion!! It is great for the preschool kids.  It targets following simple directions, such as "Drive the firetruck to the house that's on fire" and "Take the firefighter to the ladder."

The mazes also touch on some simple problem solving-- which, be the way, I always find it interesting when I do activities with my students that are similar to things I used to do as a kid (mazes, Memory, etc...) and how I have such a different perspective on them now--obviously as a kid I just thought they were fun games, but as an SLP I see them as vocabulary, problem solving, recall, etc!

"Fire Rescue" also has these puzzle games where it gives the outline of a fire-related picture, and you have to put the puzzle pieces back in accordingly.  If you just get the piece in the general vicinity of the correct location, it puts it in place for you, which I like for the younger ones!  These puzzles are great for making simple predictions ("Can you tell what our puzzle is going to be?" "What do you think we're putting together?") and for fire-related vocabulary (fire hydrant, siren, etc...).  After the puzzle is complete, the audio kicks in and gives a brief description of what the item is and what it is used for-- vocab & functions right there!

The app also incorporates basic concepts into it, like the truck being empty/full of water and if you have enough/need more water.  The narration also gives directives like, "Help the firefighter climb UP the ladder/climb DOWN the ladder" and "The firetruck is dirty.  Let's wash it!" and "Look, now the firetruck is sparkly clean!"

As for a fun craft with a firefighter theme... I always do Jenn's firefighter craft that you can see here on her blog for fire safety and community helpers! I love doing crafty activities where parents can see exactly what we've worked on when it's sent home.

Lastly.. for another fun fire-related activity, see my blog post from October on "spraying" out fires in the speech room!

Community Helpers Day 1: Dentists!

This week in preschool is Community Helpers Week. I love this week because there is SO much great vocabulary to be learned between all the community helpers and their tools of the trade!

One of the community helpers/occupations we've talked about is dentists, which ties in perfectly with February being Dental Health Month, too!  We read a cute Dora story called "Show Me Your Smile! A Visit To the Dentist" that was perfect for targeting basic dentist-related vocabulary and simple WH questions.

I picked up this book at a thrift store for 50 cents!

After reading the book, I did a cute tooth craft with my articulation kids.  I drew an outline of a tooth on white paper (cardstock is great, but just heavier construction paper works well, too!), grabbed some liquid glue, and asked the school nurses for a couple of toothbrushes!

The kids got to "brush" the teeth by squeezing glue (the "toothpaste") all over the paper, and used a toothbrush to spread out the glue, "brushing" and "scrubbing" the toothpaste onto the whole tooth.  After the glue was on, the kids stuck pictures of their speech words onto the tooth as they practiced.

We were working on final /k/ words for that tooth!

I initially started out with shaving cream instead of glue, but the shaving cream didn't spread very easily with the toothbrushes... I saw one of the prek teachers doing something similar at art with glue and glitter, and had the idea to glue their target words onto the teeth instead! (I decided to give the glitter a little break after If You Give A Mouse A Cookie week!)

For some cute dental-themed vocabulary cards, check these out from 2TeachingMommies.  I also have a free tooth/tooth fairy-themed associations card set in my TpT store!

Check back for more posts this week on other community helper-themed activities we're doing in the speech room!

Olympic Rings Craftivity

Hi, my name is Kari and I'm an Olympics junkie.

Since I'm a junkie, I decided I had to incorporate the Winter Olympics into therapy somehow! In small groups today in one of my prek classrooms, we did a fun and super easy Olympic rings craftivity involving some basic vocabulary.

All you need for this activity are some paper plates, glue, crayons or markers, scissors, and pictures of red, blue, green, black, and yellow items. You may be able to snag some paper plates from the cafeteria if you don't already have some in your room!

To start out, either you or your students color the outer edges of the paper plates the different colors of the Olympic rings. When you're done, fold it in half and snip the middle of the plate to start cutting out the center.

For my small group activity, I had the kids take turns pulling pictures of different colored items out of a bag. They had to name the picture and then find the Olympic ring whose color matched the color of the picture in their hand. Once they did, they glued the picture onto the ring.

We ended up using the same rings for each of the 3 groups since I didn't get a chance to prep more than one set ahead of time, so that's why there are multiple pictures of the same things on each ring.. but many of my kids need the repetition so really, it worked out just fine! :)  This was a great activity for my 3s and younger 4s still working on basic picture and color naming skills.   It also lends itself well to WH questions about the pictures, as well as categories.  You could probably even have your students describe the pictures for a higher level task!

Don't have time to find your own photos for this activity? Grab mine here!

I also plan to use this with my artic kids tomorrow! I will use the small size paper plates and have them color the "rings" as they do drill.  I plan to copy the black/white pictures from the Jumbo Artic Book from Super Duper onto colored paper (blue, red, green, and yellow printer paper) and after they draw a picture from the bag, they'll glue pictures of their speech words onto the different colored rings based on the color paper the words were copied on.  If you don't have the Jumbo Artic Book, you can print off free pictures from Mommy Speech Therapy.  Print in grayscale and put colored printer paper in the machine-- easy peasy!

How are you incorporating the Olympics into speech therapy? Would love to hear your ideas!