PreK Pushin: Math & Communication Goals-- How do they go together?

Graph image by Creative Lessons Cafe

Push-in therapy.  In-class support.  Co-teaching.  Whatever you want to call it, going into the classroom to provide in-class support minutes to your students can definitely require some outside-of-the-box thinking if you're not the one who has planned & is leading the lesson.  I know--it's hard sometimes as SLPs to let go of having a set therapy plan at all times!

Depending on the schedule (a public school SLP's favorite thing!), you might have to come in during small group instruction times and just keep your fingers crossed they're doing a language arts-type activity and not something seemingly completely unrelated like, say... math.  As many preschool programs become more academic lesson-based rather than more play-based, you might be encountering situations like this more often when providing in-class minutes.

Sometimes, I come in and my students are at a group working on vocabulary (woot! My lucky day!).  Other times, I'm not so lucky, but with a little creative thinking, I can make it work.  Let's take a look at this math activity where the class was learning the concept of graphing.  As they took turns rolling a die with various colored baseball hats, they colored a box in the column of the same-colored hat they rolled.

Source: 2TeachingMommies

Upon first glance, one might be thinking, "Colors, counting, and graphing... completely unrelated to speech and language goals.  How do I target my students' goals doing THIS?"  Well, I'm glad you asked! Here are a few different areas of preschool speech and language skills you can target in an activity like this:

1.  MLU
This activity would easily lend itself to structured sentence building.  Working on combining two words together? My turn, your turn, my roll, I roll, you roll, blue hat, red hat, etc....  Three word combos? "I got blue" "I have red" "More yellow hats" "Two blue hats" "My turn roll" etc...

2.  Basic Concepts
Preschool math involves learning about quantitative concepts, and many of my students have goals for basic concept knowledge.  With graphing, you can work on concepts like more/less/most (Which column has more? Which one has less, blue or red?  Which one has the most boxes colored in?) as well as full/empty/no/none (Are there any columns that are full? Any that are empty/that have none/that have no boxes colored?).  I also targeted spatial concepts like "Color the box that's above/on top of  the yellow one you already colored"  or "The red column is next to the yellow column."  Throw in some size concepts such as long/tall/short columns and make comparisons, too!

3.  Pronouns
If you have a student in the group working on pronouns, have them practice using "he" and "she" to tell you what their peers just rolled "He rolled a blue" "She rolled red" etc... and even "I" if they are using "me" instead of "I" (I had a kiddo on my caseload where we worked on using "I" for two school years.  His teacher would model it/recast it with emphasis when he made an error, as did I, the classroom paraprofessionals, and his other therapists.  We all did the happy dance this Spring when he finally started using it in conversation!)

4.  Articulation
I generally do pull-out therapy with my artic/phono kids, but try to do a little in-class support when I can, in a natural environment like the classroom.  With this activity, I can work with my artic students on initial /f/ (four, five), initial /t/ (my turn, two), initial /m/ (me, my turn), and /p, b/ sounds for colors like "pink" "purple" and "blue."


Speech and language skills can be worked on just about anywhere, at any time!  How do you target communication goals in math or other seemingly unrelated lessons?

How can I use that to target language? - Letter Tiles -

“How can I use THAT to target my student’s language goals?”

It’s a question I’ve thought to myself more than once going into the preschool rooms to do push-in therapy with my language students.  When I push in to the classrooms to provide therapy, I often times just follow the child’s/teacher’s lead and take whatever they are working on or playing with & figure out how to put a speech/language twist on it.  At this point, with it being my 4th year in preschool, I've become pretty good at making just about anything a language activity, but it definitely takes some creative thinking at times-- for instance, using letter tiles to target pronouns & spatial concepts!

The other day, I walked into a classroom at centers & the student I was going to work with was playing with letter tiles.  One of his language goals is for subject pronoun usage-- “he” “she” and “they.”  We started spelling out names of people who are important to him-- his brother, his mom, and his teacher.  I modeled sentences for him like, “HE starts with an A” or “SHE has ‘T.’  SHE has an ‘I’” etc… as we put each letter in the sequence.  After we were done with a couple different names, we compared.. “THEY both have an ‘A’”  “THEY start with different letters.”  After we were done, I heard his teacher modeling for him, too, emphasizing pronouns-- “Were you working with Miss Kari? SHE’S the best, isn’t she?” -- Double bonus! :)

You could also use the tiles to target spatial concepts..

-”Put the “A” on top of the “K””

-”Put the “C” next to the “D”

-”Put an ‘M’ above the ‘N’ etc...

-After putting a sequence of letters together, you could ask which letter is first/last in the row.

It’s an easy way to hit spatial concepts for your goal, while also working on letter recognition, which the ECSE teacher is likely working on, too!  If they are not at the level of letter recognition yet, you could step it down & do it by colors-- Put a blue letter under a green letter, etc… while still modeling the letter names afterwards.. “You’re right! the blue N is UNDER the green M”  

I know letter ID isn’t necessarily a goal we work on as SLPs, but my teachers try to work on language goals for me, so I try to model academic concepts for them, too!

WH questions is another potential area to target.  It depends on whether your student needs visual supports or not, but you could ask questions about what you just spelled with letter tiles-- ie, if you spelled “hat” you could ask “Where does a hat go?”   If you spell “sky” you could ask “What do you see up in the sky?” etc...

What other ways can you think of to use letter tiles to target language goals?

Turkey Talk- a Thanksgiving craftivity!

Need a quick, easy-prep activity to use for Thanksgiving? I've got you covered! I used this super cute craft with my articulation students this morning & it was a huge hit-- the kids were SO proud of their turkeys & were eager to show them off to everyone!

Trace a large circle onto brown construction paper (I used a paper plate as a template), as well as a small one (I used the inner circle of a paper plate that I cut out).  Use multiple pieces of paper at once to cut out multiple circles, noses, and legs ahead of time.  You'll have to wait on tracing the hands, obviously, until your students are with you, but you can cut out multiple hands at the same time, too, once they're traced, to save time!

You'll also need some construction paper in other colors (I used Fall colors) for the "feathers", orange triangles for the nose, and googly eyes.  Just glue the head and legs onto the body, and the feathers anywhere around the body you'd like! This one pictured was totally student-driven; he apparently had a VERY clear idea of where he wanted his feathers to go.. and it turned out so cute! I love it!

You could easily write speech words on the feathers (which I did on another one) or glue pictures of their words onto the feathers (think Jumbo Articulation Book pictures).  I'm sure all of you creative SLPs can think of other things to do with it, too-- how else would you use this fun craft?

Co-Teaching Tuesday: Pete the Cat in the PreK rooms!

I'm a day late with it, but here is the latest Co-Teaching Tuesday post!

For small groups in the preschool rooms during Pete week, I did a coloring activity that focused on vocabulary.  I used these coloring pages that I made from last year, where I printed a picture of Pete the Cat and wrote "I love my {color} shoes" above him.  I then printed/cut out black and white coloring page-type pictures of items that are the same color as the named shoe color, and glued the pictures all around the page before making copies.

 

For small groups, I had 3 brown bags, each containing pictures of the different colored items on the pages (i.e. 1 bag had the red items from the red shoe page, another bag had all blue items from the blue shoe page, etc...).

I had each kid take a turn drawing a picture out of one of the bags.  They had to tell me what it was and what color it was, and then whoever had that item on their page could color it.

This activity lent itself easily to working on a variety of other language targets, too!  We hit WH questions (i.e. "Who lives in a tree?" on the green page), categories (i.e. "What are some other fruits?" for apple on the red page), and functions ("What do you do with a banana?" on the yellow page).  We also did a little bit with basic concepts, like talking about fast vs slow animals when the turtle picture was pulled, named things that were hot vs cold when the sun was pulled, etc... The kids seemed to really like it!

Find all the other activities we did with Pete in speech by checking out this post!

Movin' Monday: Movin' & 'Groovin' with Pete the Cat!

Oh Pete.. who doesn't love Pete the Cat and his carefree, no stress, "it's all good" attitude? We love Pete here in preschool!

One of my goals this year is to do more activities where my kids are up and moving around while working on their speech/language goals, instead of sitting at a table.  A lot of my little ones have a really tough time sitting still for any length of time (and to be honest, I can't really blame them-- I sat in an inservice for 7ish hours last week, and while I loved the speaker and it was interesting, I know all of us SLPs were really struggling to stay focused and alert while in our seats!), so I wanted to try more activities with movement to keep them more engaged!

Anyway, I decided to kick-start my Movin' Mondays feature by sharing what we did a couple weeks ago to "move and groove" during Pete the Cat week!

(note his 'groovy buttons') :)

We did different activities based on what book we were using.  For the "Four Groovy Buttons" book, we used this big hand-drawn Pete and his buttons to work on following directions and simple basic concepts, like:

"Put the yellow button on top of the pink button"

"Move a green button to the bottom" 

"Put a small button next to a big button"

"Put the red button up high/down low"

You could also target same/different with 2 same/2 different color buttons!

For articulation, we went on a "button hunt" around the room.  

When they found a button, they had to say a speech word before moving on to find another button.  

MsJocelynSpeech has some cute button articulation packs on TpT, like this /k/ pack, and TeachSpeech365 has a "Button Bananza" following directions pack on TpT, as well, if you are looking for some other general button-themed activities!

We also used my "Snazzy Sneaker Articulation" pack on TpT that I made to use with my "back to school" activities.  They also went perfectly with the second Pete book, "I Love My White Shoes."
We played Memory with these cards, and went on a "shoe hunt" with these, too!

 What can I say? My preschoolers love hunting for any and everything!!

One thing I did to adapt the shoe cards to fit a language goal happened while I was with 2 students-- 1 was artic, while the other was working on using complete sentences with is/are.  I started off by having the one working on 'be' verbs hide the cards while I did some drill with the artic student.  The student working on articulation had to find a card, and bring it to the other student.  That student had to tell him "This is a ___" and name the item.  The artic kid then had to say the word 5x.  When they were done, I let them switch roles for hiding/finding.  It worked well and kept both engaged while working on two different goals simultaneously!

This book is also great to target associations/categories (i.e. things that are red, fruits, things that are blue, etc...).

What else did we do for Pete week?

"Rockin In My School Shoes" wonderful for some basic vocabulary (labeling) and object functions for preschool.  I found clipart for a variety of the pictures in the book (soccer ball, guitar, book etc...) and we used these pictures to play games for labeling objects and identifying object functions.

This book is also perfect for modeling short simple phrases/sentences for your increasing MLU kids.  I would model a sentence for them on each page and have them imitate (i.e. "Pete eats lunch" "Pete slides down" etc..).  This book in particular also lends itself well to inferencing and "where" questions!

The Harper Collins website has a Pete the Cat "Memory" game you can print off. I used this to model phrases/sentences, and also used this to target pronoun "He" and 'be' verbs (i.e. "He is sliding" "He is eating lunch" etc...).  I have also used this just as a general reinforcer activity!

Carrie's Speech Corner had some fun ideas for coloring pages that I used, as well.  Check out what other activities she used on her blog, too!

What are some of your favorite things to do with Pete the Cat? Stay tuned for tomorrow's "Co Teaching Tuesday" post for the Pete-themed activity I used in the prek classrooms during small groups!