Halloween-themed Books for Speech Therapy

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In an effort to increase the number of children's books that I own, I recently bought a bunch of Halloween / Fall-themed books for my students. The following 10 books are some of the ones that I thought might be great for use in therapy with my K-5th caseload. I have found that even 4th and 5th graders still enjoy listening to stories, even when they are geared for younger audiences. Click on the book title to be redirected to the product page on amazon.

Where's My Mummy? by Carolyn Crimi
In a game of hide and seek, Baby Mummy loses his mother and tries to find her. During his efforts, he comes across a number of creepy creatures. This book contains a lot of word play and onomatopoeia. Great book for K-2nd.

The Monster of the Woods! by Claire Freedman & Russell Julian
Owl, Mouse, and Rabbit are trying to come up with a plan in case the Monster of the Woods decides to come to their house. When the Monster of the Woods stops by, they are in for a surprise. This book has a lot of suspense and would work well for K-2nd.

Pumpkin Soup by Helen Cooper
Cat, Squirrel and Duck usually work as a team to cook their delicious pumpkin soup. But what will happen when Duck decides that he wants to be the one in charge of stirring? This is a great book to talk about problem-solving, compromising, resolving arguments, and friendship. I think even 5th graders would enjoy this story!

The Hallo-Wiener by Dav Pilkey
Oscar the wiener dog is tired of the other dogs making fun of him because of his odd shape. Things get worse when his mom gets him a silly hot dog costume for Halloween... This is a good book to talk about teasing, others' feelings, and overcoming adversity. Great for grades K-5th.

The Perfectly Horrible Halloween by Nancy Poydar
I first came across this book when I was researching book titles to include in my social skills curriculum over the summer. It is out of print, but you can still find it used on amazon. Arnold is excited about his class's Halloween party because he has the best pirate costume. However, when he gets to school, he realizes that he left his costume on the school bus. From this point on, Arnold just knows he is going to have a horrible day. This book is great for talking about dealing with disappointment and teaching flexible thinking skills. Can be used for grades K-5th.

A Job for Wittilda by Caralyn & Mark Buehner
This book has cats - instant winner! Wittilda the witch has a cat-hoarding problem and ran out of food. To solve her problem, she has to find a job. But keeping a job isn't as easy as Wittilda had hoped... This book has a lot of humor and adorable pictures. You can use it to talk about problem-solving with grades K-5th.

Porkenstein by Kathryn Lasky & David Jarvis
Dr. Smart Pig is sad because he doesn't have any friends (they were eaten by the big bad wolf). To overcome his loneliness, he decides that he will invent a friend. After several failed attempts, he finally manages to create a pig. However, Dr. Smart Pig soon realizes that his new friend has an insatiable appetite... Humorous story that would be enjoyable especially by older elementary students.

Big Pumpkin by Erica Silverman
The witch decides to grow a pumpkin to make pie. However, she runs into a problem when the pumpkin grows too large to be pulled off the vine. How will she get the pumpkin off the vine? Good story to talk about problem-solving and teamwork. This book would work best with grades K-2nd.

Pumpkin Jack by Will Hubbell
Tim carves his first jack o'lantern this year. After the Halloween magic is over and the pumpkin begins to rot, Tim doesn't have the heart to throw it into the garbage. The book follows the journey of the rotting jack o'lantern which gives life to a new pumpkin plant. This book has some good vocabulary and would work great with grades 2nd-5th.

Too Many Pumpkins by Linda White
Rebecca Estelle hates pumpkins and grows everything in her garden except. Through a mishap, she ends up with hundreds of pumpkins and now needs to figure out what to do. Great for problem-solving and talking about flexible attitudes. This book has a little bit more text and would probably work best with grades 2nd-5th.

Of course there are tons more books revolving around Halloween / Fall, but of the ones I own these were my 10 favorites! I also have quite a few titles that are more appropriate for a younger crowd and may write about these in the next couple of weeks.

~Viola 

Educational Insights Game Review: Robot Face Race

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links.

One new amazing game that I wanted to share about today is Robot Face Race by Educational Insights. This is a neat game that can be modified into a quick and easy language activity and our students won't even suspect that they're learning. And of course it would also make a great family game to play at home if you have children of your own. The game supports 2-4 players and is recommended for ages 4 and up.

Robot randomizer & game play

The game board consists of 120 robot heads -- all of which have unique color combinations and none two robots are the same. The object of the game is to be the fastest player to find a robot with a specific color combination. The game also comes with a "robot randomizer", a plastic contraption picturing robot face parts and small colored balls that are covered by a clear bubble. This clever design allows players to shake the randomizer so that each ball rolls towards different face part. Players then have to analyze the color combination and match the colors for each face part to find the corresponding robot on the board. The first player to spot the robot face puts a scoring token on top of it. If their guess is correct, they get to keep this token; if their guess is incorrect, they sit out the next round (which is a good rule for our students with impulsivity). The first person with five tokens is the winner.

This game is a great tool for students working on improving their visual tracking / discrimination skills and impulsivity control. And, as with most games, you can "speechify" this one and use it to work on language targets. Here are just a few ideas:

• Describing: You can use the different robot faces to target describing goals. One student could describe a specific robot (e.g., "My robot has a rectangular blue head with three green eyes, a yellow triangular nose, and a smiling purple mouth") while the other students have to listen and find the match.
• Comparing / Contrasting: Have students pick two robots and compare and contrast them
• Following directions: You can work on listening comprehension by giving directions, such as: "Place a token underneath a yellow robot / between a blue and a green robot," etc.

The versatility of this game is what makes it so great for use in Speech therapy. Another reason I love this game is because it requires no batteries!

~Viola

Social Skills Group Behavior Expectations

I am continuing to progress through my social skills curriculum with my groups and last week we began to tackle Lesson #2: Behavior Expectations and Rules. In both my younger and older groups we have been discussing what rules are and why we need them (even if we don't like some of them). We also compared / contrasted the rules that we have at home versus the ones we have at school.

My 4th-5th graders came up with some great ideas!

For our activity, I had my older students (grades 4-5) brainstorm and write down five rules they thought would be the most important ones to follow while participating in our group. They had some awesome ideas, including to "keep hands to self", "think about others' feelings", "listen to the teacher", etc. I think my favorite suggestion was to "Be 100% great!"


Our top 5 rules for
social skills group

For my younger students I modified this activity by collectively coming up with possible group rules as I was writing them down. They also had some great ideas, including "Don't get naked" :). I love my social skills kiddos!

On the right are the top 5 rules that we decided are the most important, even though there may be other rules that we know we must follow (the "unwritten" rules - such as being honest). We posted these for all to see on the bulletin board. I did feel that we needed to talk a little bit more about this topic, so we will be continuing this lesson this week by learning about consequences when breaking a rule.

~Viola

Playroom Entertainment Game Review: Monkey Memory

Monkey Memory - get it here!

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I have another great game by Playroom Entertainment up for review (three more to follow!): Monkey Memory! This card game relies on students' recall of visual information, which makes it a great activity for individuals who are trying to hone their short term memory skills. Monkey memory is quick and easy to learn, and consists of sturdy and durable cards (always a plus when playing card games with children!). The recommended number of players is 2-8 and the age range is 5 and up.

The object of the game is to correctly identify an item that is missing from a set. The game consists of 10 matching object cards (e.g., cards that depict every day items, such as a shoe, keys, banana...), as well as solution cards (a card that pictures all of the items from the object cards). Each player receives a solution card, while the object cards are separated into two identical stacks. The cards of one of these stacks are displayed in a line on the table, so that all of the players can see. The second stack is placed upside down on the table. (The directions say to only use 7 of the 10 pairs, although you could easily use all of the cards to make the game more challenging)

Example of game play.

Players take turns being the dealer, with the oldest going first. The dealer turns over a card from the second stack one at a time, covering the last revealed card  as the other players watch. The last card - the mystery card - is NOT revealed. Players have to rely on their memory to determine which object has not been revealed and use their thumb to cover the item on the solution card. Players who guess correctly, get a point (point cards are included in this game, as well). After each turn, another player becomes the dealer and chooses seven new pairs of object cards. You can modify the difficulty of this game by deciding how many card pairs you will be using.

This game would be a fun activity to use with students who are learning to utilize memory strategies (e.g., subvocalization, visualization, etc.)!

~Viola

Friendship Tree

I have started pulling kids in for social skills groups last week, and it just so happened that one of the activities for the first lesson of my curriculum coincided with the advent of fall! The first lesson is really just an introduction to social skills group and designed to define the term "social skills" (e.g., what are they, why do we need them?) for my students. The activity I chose to do with my groups was to make a "friendship tree." I had gotten the idea for this from my wedding, where we had a thumbprint tree instead of a guestbook, due to the small number of guests we had.

To make the tree I printed the template onto cardstock and brought in my Tsukineko inkpads (the manufacturer offers a large color variety, but the green palette works best for obvious reasons). I had each student put their thumb onto the inkpad and place a stamp / leaf onto our Friendship tree. Next, they got to write their name onto their leaf.

This activity offered a great opportunity to talk about the fact that even though we are all similar (like leaves on a tree), we all bring a level of individuality and uniqueness to the table, and all possess different skills.

This activity was a lot of fun and yielded a pretty result. And some of my more rigid students practiced their coping skills as they learned to deal with the fact that the ink didn't wash off their fingers right away ;).

~Viola

Social Skills Curriculum / How I Spent My Summer

When I began working in the public schools, I quickly realized that there was a great need for social skills groups. Parents and staff seemed to be under the impression that this was an area of expertise for SLPs -- which most of you would agree is definitely NOT an accurate assumption! The only instruction on social skills that I have received in my graduate program is to be taught the definition of the term "pragmatics." That's pretty much where it ended. However, I was expected to work on this with a large number of students.

Not sure where to begin, I purchased tons of books on the subject. Unfortunately, most programs out there didn’t meet my needs – the lessons and activities were either too challenging / not engaging / too easy / required materials that you had to make yourself / etc. And - don't hate me - but even Michelle Garcia Winner's materials were a bit too dry for my students.

Over the last three years I have taught elementary level social skills groups by piece-mealing my own curriculum and developing my own lessons and activities. This summer, I decided to relinquish my break and finally sat down to type up actual lesson plans, including some of the activities that I have done with my groups and adding many, many more ready-to-use materials and activities. While this project pretty much consumed my summer break, I felt it was something that I really had to do. The finished result is a resource that is (hopefully!) easy to implement and can be used with different elementary populations to work on social skills.



Click on the picture to see the product in my TPT store!

The completed bundle contains 37 lesson plans and 229 supplementary activities for Elementary to Middle school level social skills groups. Each lesson is designed to last between 30 – 60 minutes (although you can stretch each lesson across several sessions by doing multiple of the included activities). Of course it is ready for sale in my TPT store (I have also made the individual sections available).

 Each lesson contains a variety of activities to choose from so that you can pick the one that most suits the group you are teaching and/or your teaching style. While some of these activities focus on relevant children’s books and require that you own the book, most of the activities are original creations by myself.

Each lesson is set up as follows: Students are being taught the skill during a whole group discussion. The second part of each lesson is comprised of activities. Each lesson contains 3-13 suggestions for relevant activities, and this section will hopefully grow over time as I discover more things to do with my groups. The topics covered in my curriculum are as follows (each individual section is also available for sale if you do not want to purchase the entire program):

Some sample activity pages.

I.FRIENDSHIP BASICS
Lesson #01: Introduction to Social Skills Group (+3 Activities)
Lesson #02: Behavior Expectations and Rules (+6 Activities)
Lesson #03: Introducing Yourself (+3 Activities)
Lesson #04: Getting to Know Each Other (+6 Activities)
Lesson #05: What Is a Friend? (+4 Activities)
Lesson #06: Filling Buckets (+3 Activities)
Lesson #07: Giving and Receiving Compliments (+3 Activities

II.CONVERSATION SKILLS
Lesson #08: Whole Body Listening (+6 Activities)
Lesson #09: STEPS (an acronym developed by myself) (+3 Activities)
Lesson #10: S = Space (+5 Activities)
Lesson #11: T = Take Turns (+6 Activities)
Lesson #12: E = Eye Contact (+6 Activities)
Lesson #13: P = Polite (+3 Activities)
Lesson #14: S = Stay on Topic (+6 Activities)
Lesson #15: Volume (+5 Activities)

III.FEELINGS & ANGER MANAGEMENT
Lesson #16: Basic Emotions  (+8 Activities)
Lesson #17: Complex Emotions (+9 Activities)
Lesson #18: Body Language & Prosody (+5 Activities)
Lesson #19: Dealing With Anger (+10 Activities)
Lesson #20: Relaxation Techniques (+8 Activities)
Lesson #21: Sensory Techniques (+13 Activities)
Lesson #22: Dealing With Change (+7 Activities)
Lesson #23: Self-Control (+5 Activities)

IV. BEING PART OF A GROUP
Lesson #24: Joining a Group (+5 Activities)
Lesson #25: Playing a Game  (+7 Activities)
Lesson #26: Dealing With Losing (+6 Activities)
Lesson #27: Sharing (+8 Activities)
Lesson #28: Fairness & Compromising (+9 Activities)

V. PROBLEM-SOLVING & MANAGING CONFLICTS
Lesson #29: Identifying Problem Sizes   (+4 Activities)
Lesson #30: Solving Problems (+8 Activities)
Lesson #31: Group Problem-Solving (+5 Activities)
Lesson #32: Bullying (+9 Activities)
Lesson #33: Dealing With Teasing (+7 Activities)
Lesson #34: Tattling (+4 Activities)
Lesson #35: Resolving Conflicts (+9 Activities)

VI. SOCIAL THINKING
Lesson #36: Perspective-Taking (+10 Activities)
Lesson #37: Thinking & Talking Bubbles (+5 Activities)

I am planning to add more lessons on SOCIAL THINKING within the next months and have drafted outlines for the following topics:

Lesson #38: Social Filter
Lesson #39: Flexible Thinking
Lesson #40: Empathy

These lessons offer a great pre-cursor to higher-level social skills programs and are designed to be a comprehensive first exposure to a social skills group. While I organized these lessons by category, you can of course use them in any order you see fit, and they can be stand-alone lessons. You can do these lessons in a social skills group setting, in a whole classroom setting, or during a speech therapy / counseling session as needed.

I have started using this curriculum with my groups last week and will post a lot of updates this year about how it is working out for us! I think this is the first year where I don't have to go into the social skills group with just a vague idea of what we're doing that day, and that feels great!

~Viola

USAopoly Game Review: Tapple

Tapple - get it here!

Note: This post contains affiliate links.

An SLP can never have too many language games. One relatively new game on the market is "Tapple" by USAopoly. And you know it has to be a great game when it has your students rolling on the floor laughing (literally)!
 
I was drawn in right away by the intriguing design of the game board - a wheel with little letter tabs sticking off to the side.  To play, players sit around the Tapple board. A card with a general category (e.g., movies) is chosen and players have to think of a matching item for the category. The trick is to think of something within 10 seconds before the timer is runs out! When a player comes up with a match, they hit the beginning letter (e.g., G - Guardians of the Galaxy), press the timer to reset it to 10 seconds, and pass the wheel to the next person. The task gets more difficult as the game progresses because there are fewer letters left to choose from. The game is recommended for ages 8 and up and can be played with 2-8 players.



My 3rd graders thoroughly enjoyed this game and even though they struggled at first, improved with their skill throughout the session. Granted, I did choose some of the easier categories (vegetables, things at a grocery store, cartoons, ...), but I wanted this to be an achievable task for them. This is a great game to use when working on word-finding, categorization, or even articulation. You can adjust the difficulty level by opting out of using the timer or telling students that they can re-use a letter that has already been pressed down. Of course you don't have to play by the rules and could adapt the Tapple board for other speech activities, such as having students think of a word that has their articulation sounds in it, etc.

The game requires minimal set-up, but provides a maximal fun learning experience, which makes it a great choice for any Speech room! Please note - you will need two AA batteries.

~Viola