Favorite Games for Final Consonant Deletion

As SLPs, many of us use games as general reinforcers while working on a variety of speech/language targets.  A lot of times, the games may have nothing to do with the target we're working on.  Some games & activities I've been using this school year with my phono kids, though, have turned out to have great opportunities to work on specific words pertinent to their targets AND to the game. Preschoolers learn a lot through play, so when I have the opportunity to use meaningful target words for artic rather than the drill/take a turn/drill/take a turn method, I take it! The following games/activities are my favorites to use when targeting the phonological process of Final Consonant Deletion:

1.  First up is this cookie jar game I made.  The cookie jar image comes from MyCuteGraphics, and is just pasted into a Word doc, stretched out, printed, and attached to a tissue box with a hole cut out of the middle.  The cookies are just circles cut from brown construction paper with black marker dots on them for chocolate chips.  So. Simple.  But my prek students LOVE it!

Words to target for FCD: eat, hot, out, plate, in, on, gone, time, scoop, chip, bake, take, make

2.  Honey Bee Tree game:

This one is played just like Kerplunk, but has leaves/bees/honeypot in a tree rather than just sticks and marbles. 

Words to target for FCD: in (putting leaves in, putting bees in), out (pulling leaves out, bees falling out, taking bees out), drop (dropping bees in) down (bees fell down), turn (my turn/your turn), buzz, bees, gone, come/home (one of my kiddos liked to make the bees buzz away for a second, and I would have to tell them to "come" and then she would have them fly "home" for each turn)

3.  Potato Head

This should come as no surprise, but there is an abundance of great words to target for FCD with everyone's favorite spud!

Words to target for FCD:

final t: hat, foot/feet, out, put

final n/m: in, arm

final s/z: eyes, nose, toes, purse, any other plurals

final f: off, 

final p: top, hop

final k: take

4.  Don't Break the Ice:

Words to target for FCD: turn (my turn/your turn), in (work on as you set up and put ice blocks in), gone (all the blocks have been knocked out), hit, out, knock, break, ice

Do you have any specific games you use for particular speech or language targets? I'd love to hear about them if you do!

Community Helpers: Project-Based Learning

This year, my school district implemented Project-Based Learning (PBL) as everyone's professional development project for the year.  If you're not familiar with Project Based Learning, it's a teaching approach that's very student-driven rather than teacher-driven, and students explore a real world problem/challenge/question of their choosing while exploring possible solutions through various methods-- research, collaboration, etc...

An excerpt from Edutopia explains it in a little more detail:

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"PBL is the ongoing act of learning about different subjects simultaneously. This is achieved by guiding students to identify, through research, a real-world problem (local to global) developing its solution using evidence to support the claim, and presenting the solution through a multimedia approach based in a set of 21st-century tools.

Kids show what they learn as they journey through the unit, interact with its lessons, collaborate with each other, and assess themselves and each other. They don't just take a test or produce a product at the end to show their learning."

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I implemented PBL by acting as support for one of my preschool teachers in a Community Helpers project in her classroom-- "What do I want to be when I grow up?" was our driving question that began PBL! (Every PBL starts with the "driving question.")

We split the kids up into small groups during PBL week based on their chosen occupations.  The kids ended up choosing to be doctors, firefighters, police officers, bakers/chefs, engineers, and astronauts.  The teacher and I loaded up our library cards with books about each occupation so the kids could start their research on their chosen occupation!

I took the doctor group, and we started researching what a doctor does by looking through books, watching videos, and exploring through apps.  I also had a doctor kit out so we could explore the tools a little more!

• Virtual Field Trip to a hospital
• Interactive Book: Pediatrician 
• Calillou's Check Up App:

From those videos, we learned about what doctors do, why they are important, what they wear, where they work, and what tools they use.  Each student drew pictures of what they learned, using these booklets that you can download on TpT here.

The tools are from the play doctor kit that was picked up for pennies at a yard sale!

After completing the booklets, the kids decided on a project they wanted to make to represent their chosen occupations.  In my doctor group, the chosen projects were doctor bags, an otoscope, and an x-ray.  These are the finished projects.. They turned out pretty cute!

I will say that I have even MORE respect for teachers after doing this project.  Within my doctor group, I had 2 kids with language delays, one peer model, and another student on an IEP for other needs besides communication. My one language student just needed some prompts to recall some of the information, but was pretty on task overall and could complete the drawings in her booklet independently.  The other student on my caseload needs significant wait time along with cuing to come up with answers.  She also says "I can't" or "I don't know how" during any activity that involves drawing, and won't attempt it unless she's walked step by step through how to draw it.  The peer model in the group FLEW through everything, and the other student not on my caseload needed a lot of prompting and cuing to stay on task.  It was such a struggle to feel like I was being effective and meeting the needs of everyone in the group, since they were all at *COMPLETELY* different levels.  I can't imagine what this feels like in a classroom of 23 students of all varying levels!

Overall, though, I'd say our PBL project was a success! We had to provide a little more guidance than what is probably *supposed* to happen for PBL, but when you work in a special needs preschool program, you have to adapt! After making their projects, we recorded short video clips of all the students talking about what they want to be when they grow up, what that job involves, what tools they use, where they work, and what they made for their project.

Does your school do Project Based Learning? If so, what projects have you done/helped with?

Dr. Seuss Describing!

Last November, I attempted a DIY Hedbanz game with different types of dinosaurs to describe.  I used it with the afternoon prek kids in each classroom for my small group rotation, and they loved it.  They needed a bit of prompting to figure out how to describe each dinosaur, but in general, it went pretty well.  So, I decided to try it out again this week with Dr. Seuss characters!

I just did a Google search for Dr. Seuss characters and pasted them into a PowerPoint slide.  I printed off two copies of this page-- one to laminate and put Velcro on for the headband, and one copy for the kids to have in front of them so they had visual choices when guessing the character on their head. 

 

(The person before me forgot to take the colored copy paper out of the printer/copy machine and I didn't have time to print another copy, so I just dealt with it!) 

I also created visuals to help my kids give clues to their peers about the characters.  I split the objects up into "Person" "Animal" or "Thing" -- this is pretty subjective, since the characters are kind of a mix of both animals and people, but I just went for it!

I also created a couple additional pages of visuals to help them in describing.  If the character in question was an animal, they could tell the "guesser" where that animal might live (in a house, in the forest, in the zoo, or in water).  If it was a person, they could describe what the person is wearing.  If it was a "thing," they could describe what you do with it.  For every category, they could describe the colors found in the pictures.

It went really well, actually-- better than I had anticipated!  Some kids didn't *quite* grasp the concept of not telling what the character was (ie "It'd live in a zoo.. 'cause it's an elephant!"(insert elephant noise and imitation of elephant's swinging trunk with the kid's arm to his nose))-ha- but like I said, for the most part, it worked out!!  I think this would also be a great way to work on describing using the EET as the visual support, too!

Want to grab a copy of these visuals?? Since Dr. Seuss is majorly copyrighted, I can't give you anything that has his characters included... BUT, you can download this blank, editable page of separating between person/animal/thing HERE and the second page of visuals with colors/homes/clothing items & accessories HERE.

Enjoy!!