Sidewalk Chalk and Speech Therapy: Taking your session outdoors

Some days (aka every day), a girl just needs some fresh air and sunshine.

While I'm fortunate that even though my room is on the small size with no cabinets for hidden storage, I DO have two windows in my room. You win some, you lose some...Who needs more storage when you've got sunlight, am I right?

Even if you're lucky enough to a) have a therapy room/office that's not a former closet or bathroom and b) have windows (I know, we're reaching for the stars for some of you here), sometimes those windows just aren't enough. There are days when my body is CRAVING fresh air and the feeling of sunshine on my skin. When I get to that point, I'm pretty sure my students are feeling that x10, so on nice days, when the patio off the PreK/K pod or the blacktop are open, I'll sometimes take therapy outside of the confining 4 walls of the therapy room. 

Cue: sidewalk chalk

My students LOVE switching it up (I'll never forget the time I told one of my preschoolers we were doing therapy outside with chalk-- his response was "YES! YES! YES! This is the best day EVER!!"  I mean, who am I to deny a child that kind of happiness?), and there are so many goals that can be targeted just using sidewalk chalk!

1.  Grammar:
a) Possessives: We draw a picture of a boy and a girl and draw objects around them (the girl's ___, the boy's ____, his ___, her ____).

b) Pronouns:  We use "he" and "she" in carrier phrases (ie "She has a..." "He has a....").  We draw clothing items/accessories on the stick people, or draw objects around them.

2.  Associations/Go Togethers:  I say or draw a picture of an object, and the student(s) I'm working with have to tell me something that goes with it, and then draw a picture of their answer (ie I say or draw "web," and they'd draw a spider).  I work on associations a lot with my 4 year olds going to kindergarten the following year!

3. Articulation: We draw pictures of words with their target speech sounds while we practice!

4. WH questions:  I ask a WH question, and the kids draw a picture of the correct answer.  For example, if I ask, "What does a bird build?" then they would draw a nest.

Sometimes I'll get the "I don't know how to draw it!" response, but I just encourage them to try their best and let them know that I don't care what it looks like, just as long as they try! Most of them are good with this response :)

What other ways do you target speech and language activities with chalk?? 



PS- If you're looking for handouts with more great ideas for chalk play (and lots of other outdoor play ideas!) to give to parents, check out this great "Summer Play" packet from SpeechRoomNews.  Shortly after I purchased it last May, I had a parent of a newly-evaluated student ask what he could do to work on communication skills over the summer.  Pulled this packet up on TpT, downloaded, hit "print" and off he went! 

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?

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!

Chicken Soup for the SLP Soul

Imagine this scenario:

You’re a first year SLP—ready to take on the world after 6 years of school including 2 years of practicums behind you.  You’re a little nervous about being out on your own, but confident enough to know that while you don’t know it all, you know enough to be plenty competent in order to do your job.  You’re ecstatic that you’ve landed your first job!

Then... “Oh by the way, these several parents of children on your caseload are not happy because their kids didn’t get the services they should have last year.  It happened before you ever came and is something you had absolutely nothing to do with, but you’ll need to put out some of these fires.” 

Um.. What?! That was terrifying for me as a shy, quiet, first-year SLP trying to get my sea legs! I had no idea what I was walking into!

One of these particular students who didn’t receive consistent services that year was a little girl with Apraxia.  Her teacher had told me that the year before, she basically “squawked” because she had such difficulty with her speech. 

I first met the freckle-faced cutie pie with Apraxia at a “Meet the Teacher” night before school started.  She was a bit shy, but we were able to talk a little bit, and I adored her right off the bat! Then, I chatted with her mom and she asked about my previous experience.  Cue hundreds of butterflies in my stomach as I desperately tried to remain confident when saying that it was my first year.  I figured after the prior school year's debacle and some lack of speech progress the year before, that a brand-spankin’ new, first-year SLP was probably not what she was hoping for!

The night went well enough, but I was still really nervous about the whole situation when I got home that night.  My husband gave me a pep talk, though, and told me, “Just do your job, and they’ll have to love you.  You’re awesome! You got this” (Thanks, hubs!)

So, that’s what I did.  I "did my job," and both me and that little girl worked our tails off that year.

I remember the day when she finally mastered the /y/ sound we had been working on.  She had a w/y substitution, so the word “yeah” always came out “wah.”  To show off, her teacher and I asked her questions like, “Are you beautiful?” “Are you smart?” “Are you funny?”  It was so fun to see her just beaming with pride and self-confidence, answering "yeah" or “yes” to all of those questions.  She never seemed to struggle with /y/ after that! ;-)

I'll never forget when her /L/ sound popped into a word one day, too. Her name had an L in it, so it was a pretty big deal! I remembered her mom telling me at the beginning of the year that whenever someone would ask her daughter's name, that her daughter would turn to her and ask her to say it, because she said she "couldn't say it right" Well, let me tell you-- She was rockin’ those /L/ sounds like nobody’s business by Spring!

About a year or so later, in May 2013, on the first official Apraxia Awareness Day, I stood next to her mom at the kindergarten graduation program. She gave me the sweet card pictured above, letting me know how much she appreciated me and the difference I’d made in her family's lives (I still keep it in my desk, and pull it out to re-read on the extra tough days for a smile!).  Together, we stood there, and watched that same freckle-faced cutie who used to squawk and be embarrassed to even attempt to say her name, sing with her peers in her end of the year kindergarten graduation program.


And that moment, right there, is why I am an SLP. Moments like that far outweigh the negatives, and I can't imagine doing anything else for a career!

Want more stories to warm your heart or make you laugh? Hop on over to the next blog, and keep reading! Don’t forget to keep collecting numbers at the end of each post so you can add them all up at the end and enter into the raffle for some AWESOME TpT gift certificates!   My number is:

Happy Hopping!

Thanks Felice at Thedabblingspeechie for organizing this awesome hop, and thanks to all of these ladies who shared their sweet stories!

An InLinkz Link-up

Potato Head Play

Mr. Potato Head is a toy that many of us SLPs have used in therapy with little ones.  It's always been toted as a "must-have" for anyone working with early intervention/prek.  I love my potato heads (I scored a big tub full of heads and accessories at a yard sale last year!), but I'll admit- there was a point in time when I first began my career, where I wondered how I could *really* use it in a variety ways besides the very basics like labeling body parts and requesting.

If any of you new to the field/new to this population have wondered the same thing, or maybe if you're a more seasoned SLP just looking for new ideas for this toy... Here are some other ways I've been targeting many other speech & language goals through potato head play with my preschoolers!

1.  Pronouns:  I have pieces that let me work on both "he" and "she" during play.  I have eyes with eyeshadow and big eyelashes, earrings, big red lips, purses, etc... so I can not only work on "Mister" potato head but also his female counterpart :)  I model a lot of "HE has green shoes on today" and "SHE has a pretty yellow purse"  and try to slightly emphasize the different pronouns.

2.  Basic Concepts:  I model comments like "He has a BIG nose and LITTLE shoes" "Here's his hat! It goes on top!"  "I'm putting her eyes ABOVE her nose"  Or, if I want to check understanding of concepts, I can say things like, "I have his shoes! Do the shoes go on the top or on the bottom?"

3.  Final consonants:  Purse, nose, arm, feet, eyes, hat, top, put, on, in, take, out-- all great words to model and practice with final consonants during play.  I like to sometimes hide the pieces in a sensory bin (ie my box of beans!) so they dig for parts and then we name the item and do short phrases like "Put on ___"     "___ on top"   and   "___ goes in"

4.  Plurals:  Talk about all the pairs your potato head has! Model plurals by talking about the potato head's two ears, two eyes, two shoes, two feet, two hands, two arms, two earrings, glasses, etc!

5.  Action words/-ING verbs:  Make your potato heads do all kinds of silly actions! "He is running" "She is shopping"  "He is dancing" etc...


What other ways do you play with potato heads?

Craftivity Tuesday: Articulation Trains

I love the way this train craftivity turned out during Transportation week-- I think it's way cute, if I may say so myself!

I made the locomotive portion of the train from a die cut at work, and then just cut rectangles from other color construction paper.  I free-handed the smoke clouds and cut out a bunch at a time by cutting multiple pages at a time, too.

[Side note:  If you do crafts in your therapy sessions, you NEED to watch Jenn's video over at Crazy Speech World on craftivities.  She shares how she makes the crafts work for therapy, and what she does to prep.  It is chock-full of great tips! And Jenn is adorable, so go check it out! :)]

I used the pictures from my Cariboo Phonology set because they were the size I was looking for (and I'd rather just hit "print" instead of standing at the oh-so-coveted copy machine that is never free when I happen to need it, making copies from an artic book!), but you could use other pictures you have on hand-- just size the smoke clouds and train cars accordingly!

Easy peasy! :)

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?

Staying Positive

As SLPs, we have one of the BEST jobs in the world.  Seriously.  We help people communicate--what could be cooler than that?!  We teach vocabulary to children in school so they can access the curriculum and collaborate with their peers.  We give alternative methods to verbal communication by teaching a child with Autism how to use a communication device.  We help retrain a stroke patient's brain in order to learn how to speak again.  We teach correct articulation production so that a child can be understood by those around him.

We are making positive changes in our students'/patients' lives every single day.  Every. Single. Day.  However... it is really easy to get wrapped up in all the downsides of our job.. as a school-based therapist, maybe it's the 4 new students that just got added to your already-too-large caseload.. or the 7 annual IEPs that are due next week, or the meeting that got changed that no one told you about, or the 65 progress notes that need to be completed... or all of the above!! With so many demands placed on us, it's easy to get discouraged.  But, in spite of all that, we have one of the most amazing and rewarding jobs you could ask for.  I really, truly, believe that.  Those little breakthrough moments where your students/patients have those "aha!" moments are what makes all those not-so-great things about our job bearable.

Today, I decided to make myself reminders of why I do what I do to keep me going and keep me inspired on the days that are harder than others.  I started writing down all the positives I could think of that had happened with my students over the last week or two.

One of my little guys on the spectrum said my name for the very first time, and then wouldn't stop turning around, looking at me, saying my name, and giggling! :)  My little one with Down Syndrome used a few words spontaneously at center time with no modeling!

A couple kids I'm doing Cycles with got their L sound in isolation & in syllables.  Another one who's been working on the /f/ sound for forever said "four" and "five" with a BEAUTIFUL /f/ at the beginning, independently while he was counting!  Another one of my students who is suspected to be on the Spectrum came over to me at centers and made lots of eye contact showing me her toys, and kept touching me if I turned away, to get me to turn back and interact with her.  She didn't even acknowledge that I was right in front of her at the start of the school year.

My goal is to write down at least one positive thing that happens each day and place it in a box, so when I'm feeling stressed out & like a failure SLP (because let's face it, we ALL have those frustrating days where it feels like no one is making progress!), I can open the box, read through the positives, and remind myself of the big smiles those kids had on their face when I was so excited about their breakthrough moments.  And, to remind myself that the work I'm doing with my students is too important to be bogged down by all the other things.

Helping people is the reason we all got into this profession... And a daily reminder of that never hurts :)

What's something positive that happened to YOU today?

Going "Buggy" In Speech!

Ah, Spring has finally arrived in Kansas and in the speech room! The next couple weeks in preschool have a theme of "Things that live and grow" so we're learning about plants and bugs.  This week in particular, I'm focusing on ladybugs!

This morning, I grabbed some red bulletin board paper from the workroom, my Jenga box, and a Sharpie, and went to town tracing circles & creating an activity for my articulation/phonological kids! It only took about 10 minutes from start to finish... But then I had to spend another 10 minutes trying to get Sharpie dots off my therapy table... (Note to self: invest in some washable markers....) 

I tossed cards onto the ladybugs, face down, and when it was their turn, the kids picked a card to swat and practiced the word on the card.  It was super easy to switch out target cards for different students and groups.  I had the kids swat their colored cards in particular to make sure they got the right practice (i.e. s-blend kids were looking for pink cards, /f/ kids were looking for red cards, etc...)

I borrowed some fly swatters from a coworker, and they just happened to ladybugs, as well, so it worked out pretty perfectly!  

Both the boys AND girls loved it! Some may have gotten a little TOO excited to use the flyswatter, but thankfully I only got whacked with it once today ;-) 

Do have any fun bug activities you're using in your speech room??

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!!

Green Eggs & Ham craftivity

Last week during our jungle/wild animal theme, I attempted a hippopotamus craft that ended up being a Pinterest fail-- thankfully, a new craftivity I have planned for Dr. Seuss week turned out much more successful! :)

I love, love, love the book, Green Eggs And Ham.  I've done craftivities for Cat In The Hat and One Fish, Two Fish, but haven't done one for Green Eggs and Ham yet!  Third year's a charm, right? :)

Just cut out a pan from black construction paper, and cut out some cooked egg-shaped pieces from green construction paper and you are good to go!

I found the idea here, and thought of some ways to adapt it for speech! I did artic words on this example, but there are plenty of other ways to use this, too.

Since frying pans are hot when you're cooking, I thought it would be great to tie in the concept of hot/cold for some of my little ones.  I also made pictures for sorting by category (breakfast foods vs dinner foods) to glue onto the eggs. Grab those pictures HERE.

My plan is to draw a line across the middle of the pan to divide the two categories, and then have them glue their hot item/cold item eggs and breakfast/dinner foods onto the pans in the correct spots (ie glue the eggs with hot items on the top part of the pan, and the eggs with pictures of cold items on the bottom part of the pan).

You could also work on food vocabulary by gluing pictures of the items onto the eggs.  Work on following directions with spatial concepts using vocab or articulation pictures and this craft, too (telling them where to glue the eggs-- "above" one picture, "next to" another picture, etc...)


One of my other favorite crafts to do this week is with One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish.  I got the idea from Busy Bee Speech last year, from this great post full of ideas!  She used watercolor paint for her fishbowl, while I just used blue construction paper.  I've written speech words on the fish, and worked on spatial concepts with this craft, too (put two yellow fish on top, put a green fish under a purple fish, etc...).

What are some of your favorite crafts for Dr. Seuss week? Stay tuned for more Dr. Seuss ideas later this week!

Movin' Mondays: Putting Out Fires!

October 6-12 is Fire Safety Week, so I thought I'd share a fire-themed activity we did in speech where the kids were up and moving.  I cut out a bunch of flames and taped them around the room-- on doors, windows, cabinets, etc...

I used this activity for my artic kids.. I had them say 2 of their speech words 5x a piece before handing them an empty water bottle (their "fire hose").  Once they had the water bottle in hand, they ran to a spot in the room that had fire on it, and "sprayed" the fire out with their "fire hose."  They got to spray 1 flame before they had to run back to me and practice 1-2 more words 5x a piece, and then they got to run to another fire before running back to me again.

                      (this guy was running so fast to put out the fires on the filing cabinets that I couldn't get a non-blurry picture!)

I have to give credit to the new SLP that I'm working with for this idea-- I saw her setting it up for her preschoolers, and thought it was too cute not to use with mine!  My kids loved it!  

What are you doing for Fire Safety week?

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!