7 ways to use Zingo in therapy as MORE than just a general reinforcer

I love using games in therapy because a) they're easy, and b) they lend themselves naturally to a variety of different skills, such as following directions, turn-taking, and learning how to handle a loss.

Often times, we might be using games as just a general reinforcer while we do drill with other skills, but today I wanted to share with you how I've used the game Zingo on its own to target a variety of communication skills, without needing any additional materials! 

Social Skills/Social Phrases:
Learning social phrases ("bummer" "aw man" "cool!" "good try" etc...) and how to handle it when a game isn't going your way are more great skills to target with this, or really any turn-taking game!  

Turn-taking:
I have some little friends who have a REALLY hard time waiting their turns.  We're talking meltdown city if waiting is involved. Turn-taking in Zingo is simple, with concrete beginnings and ends of your turn, which is one of the things I L-O-V-E about using it to target waiting your turn.

Common Object Vocabulary/Functions/WH Questions:
The picture tiles depict common objects such as "car" "apple" "boat" "tree" "train" "cake" etc... You can work on labeling these pictures, describing their function (when applicable), and answering WH questions about the items ("What do you do with a car?" "Where do you see a boat?" "Who drives a train?" etc...)

Prepositions:
You slide the top (aka the "Zinger") OUT, picture tiles come OUT, and then you either put the tiles ON your board, or back IN the Zinger.  Lots of opportunities for repetition with these prepositions within the game.

Answering Yes/No:
Target yes/no by asking, "Is it a match?" or "Do you have a __?" Also a great opportunity to work on the concept of negation ... "not a match" or "I don't have a ___"

Articulation/Apraxia:
VC words: I used this with one of my little guys with Apraxia who is working on words that start with vowel sounds.  I was able to target the words "out" and "in" with tons of repetitions in a functional way, without it feeling like drill.

/SL/:  Do you have any kids working on s-blends? (#justkidding. I know you do.).  Practice the word "SLide" each time you slide the Zinger out.

"CH": I've used this game to target final "ch" with "match" and "no match."

/V/: Work on word final /v/ within the phrases/sentences "I have..." or "I don't have..."

/G/: Your kiddos can practice "go" with "It GOES on my board" or "It GOES back in."  Or, I've also simplified it to "go on" and "go back in"/"go in")

Pronouns:
My turn, your turn, I got, you got, you have (#) left, I have (#) left, He has, She has... I go, you go... plenty of ways to target pronouns in a more natural setting/manner versus, say, using a card deck of pronouns.


Zingo is one of my favorite games to use in therapy because it's so easy to target a variety of skills! 

Looking for more ways to use games to target your communication goals without just using them as a reinforcer? You'll love this post on my favorite games for final consonant deletion! 

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!

Paper, Pencil, and Paperclip Challenge

Let me start out this post by saying that I was NOT skilled in the art of improvising when I was doing therapy in grad school.  Not. At. All.  How times have changed... :)

I'm linking up with Felice over at Thedabblingspeechie for her paper, pencil, and paperclip challenge! I'm sure many of you have heard the quip from a supervisor at some point in school that you should be able to do therapy with just a paperclip.  I personally don't remember ever being told that, actually, by any of my former professors or supervisors, but I've had multiple coworkers and other SLPs I know say that they were told this in school! (Maybe I was told this but the thought of doing therapy with no materials at that time was too scary and I just blocked it from memory...)

Doing therapy on the fly comes second nature to me now, and I feel like I could do it with just about any sort of materials.. including just a paperclip if I really had to! I'm glad Felice let us use a paper and pencil, too, though ;-)


1:  Articulation spin

I drew a spinner with numbers 1-6 using paper and pencil, and we used the pencil and paperclip as the spinner! My student spun the "spinner" and I gave him a word to say the same number of times as the number he landed on.  At one point, he spun the paperclip so hard that it flew off the table-- then this little guy was REALLY into it, and kept "happening" to spin the paperclip off the table on "accident." .. ha.


2.  Following directions using spatial concepts (We just used the same piece of paper from the previous activity since I came to the prek pod only armed with one piece of paper!).

I just had my student follow different directions placing different items on top/under/next to, etc....  Put the paper behind your back, in front of you, on top of your head, etc...  Put the pencil on top of the paperclip.  Hide the paperclip under the paper.  Put the paperclip next to the pencil.  Draw an X above the paperclip.  I think you get the picture!  If your kids are at the point where they can work on the concepts expressively,  they always love to be the "teacher" and tell you where to place things!

Click the first picture in this post to head over to Felice's blog and see how other SLPs are getting creative with paperclips, pencils, and paper!

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! :)

"What's In Your Cart?" Link-Up-- Tpt Cyber Monday Is Here!

Linking up with Speech Room News today for her "What's In Your Cart" link up! The TpT Cyber Monday sale is here & there are SO many great materials I've had my eye on-- it's hard to narrow it down! But, here are a couple of my new items I think you'll want to check out, as well as a handful of items that have found their way into my cart :)

Here's what I think you should take a look at from my store-- two new winter-themed interactive phonology units.  I have SO many phono kids on my caseload this year, so I need a lot of new materials to keep them engaged & motivated.

Up first is a Build A Snowman Phonology-- Your students will get to build a snowman by placing snowballs and snowflakes all around a large picture scene

The second new winter item in my store is Decorate the Tree Phonology-- your kids get to decorate a tree with silly lights and cute ornaments all while practicing their phonological targets!

*****

Now, for the items in my cart from other sellers: 

1.  Positional Concepts with Sid the Kid from Maureen over at The Speech Bubble

2.  Winter Fun Pack from Mia at Putting Words In Your Mouth 

3.  AAC Starter Kit from Felice over at Thedabblingspeechie

4.  File Folder Songs for Basic Language from CC at Super Power Speech

What's in your cart that you're excited about? Be sure to click the link below the first image at the top to head over to Speech Room News to see what other SLP bloggers have in their carts! You'll probably find a lot of great items/sellers that you weren't aware of previously!

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?

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??