Valentine Social Skills

The Valentine festivities continue with my home-made activities! Because I have so many students working on social and conversation skills, I made a Valentine-themed activity targeting those areas (I had previously created similar activities for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and they were well-received by my students).

The purpose of this game is to get as many matching chocolates into a candy box by answering questions about social skills scenarios. Below is an example of some of the prompts:

Sample prompts.

Once they answer a question, students have to find the matching candy and place it onto the picture of a heart-shaped box. I am thinking that it might be fun to get a real candy box and have them place the candy in there! Maybe I will snag one up for next year when the Valentine sales begin on 02/15 :).

My student is placing a matching candy into the box.

I think my students' favorite aspect of this game was to find the matching chocolates, since they looked all so similar. I suppose this was great practice for their visual skills, as well! This activity is available in my TpT store here. It comes complete with 36 prompts and 9 blank cards to add your own to the mix.

~Viola

TpT Freebie: Valentine's Day Sequencing Cards

My downloadable freebie this month are Valentine's Day sequencing cards that I created in Boardmaker. 

I made these with some of my special day class students in mind. These would work well to review the routine of Valentine's Day, to use in a social story, or simply to work on sequencing. They are available here. 

 ~Viola

Articulation Hearts Craftivity

Since my students always get really excited by the prospect of artsy activities, I decided to do a Valentine-themed craftivity with my artic kids. I prepped the activity by cutting out a bunch of construction paper hearts in various colors and sizes on our die-cut machine.

Lots of red shades!

Next, I created a circular Wreath template in Word, printed it, and cut it out (the cutting out beforehand will save valuable time during the session).

Wreath template. The side with the writing is the back.

I cut out the middle using an X-Acto knife.

When my students arrived, I gave them a word list with their target sounds. I told them that they needed to say each word over and over as they copied it onto the construction paper hearts and keep practicing as they glued it onto the wreath. I think we got far more than 10 productions out of each word! There were times when they were forgetting to practice because they were so engulfed in the art aspect, but they were easily redirected ("I'm not hearing XXX practicing!").

 

The (almost finished) product.

You can easily adapt this activity for younger kids by omitting the writing component. The group I did this with today was composed of two pretty responsible and independent 3rd grade girls. To make this easier for less disciplined students, you could have them earn a heart for each X number of time they practice their words to add more structure and predictability to the activity. 

All in all, this is a pretty inexpensive DIY therapy idea for Valentine's Day week. And the students get to take something home!

~Viola

Valentine Conversation Hearts

Last weekend I realized that Valentine's Day is almost upon us and I didn't really have any themed activities prepared for my students. They always really seem to get into the holidays, so I sat down and made a few materials for us to work on this and next week. A few months ago I had purchased some cute Valentine candy clip art which came in handy in creating a conversation hearts activity to practice pragmatics, expressive language, and articulation generalization skills. 

The objective of the game is simple: Answer a question and earn as many heart points as you can to win. When it is a student's turn, they draw a conversation hearts card. These cards contain conversation starters and personal questions. If they answer the question using good pragmatics, grammar, or articulation, they earn the points depicted on the bottom of the card.

An example of the conversation heart cards.

Once they earn the points, they mark the number on a score sheet. See-through plastic pouches or sheet protectors work wonderfully for this and save paper and ink.

The score sheet.

I told students that they could either color in the hearts or just mark them with an X, depending on their personal preference (a lesson I learned today is that some students are meticulous about coloring in the lines, which can make it take forever).

My 1st grade boy preferred making X's.

My 1st grade girl preferred coloring the hearts.

All in all, this activity was a lot of fun for my students. They couldn't wait to see who would have the most points by the end of our session! And the best part is, I can re-use this activity again and again. It is available for purchase in my TpT store here.

This game is available here.

I have some more cute VD activities planned, and I am hoping to trial them and post updates soon! Happy Valentine's Day!

~Viola

First World Problems

I have taken the last few weeks off from blogging, only because I felt myself getting really burned out. Tons of IEPs, the holidays, returning to work after the break and being faced with a pile of things that needed to be done -- there were just a lot of days where I had to take a step back and breathe. I think most of us get to this point once in a while. There are so many frustrations we face in our line of work and at the end of the day I still sometimes ask myself whether all of my efforts are really making a difference for these kids. It just feels that there aren't enough hours in the day to accomplish the things we need to get done. 

With these feelings of discouragement I decided that I needed a little air from anything therapy-related outside of my job, which included blogging as well as creating materials. I gave myself some time to rearrange my thoughts and looking at my problems from a different perspective. Things could be so much better, but they could also be a whole lot worse. So let's sit back and think about the negative things about our jobs, but then put them into a different light:

• Sometimes I just don't know if therapy is making a difference for some of these kids ...but at least it won't hurt them!
• Writing reports takes forever ...but at least I have tons of templates now, making the process a little bit faster.
• My $250 budget/year to use on both conferences and therapy materials never seems to be enough ...but at least I have the talent needed to make a lot of my own materials.
• I feel like I don't get much done despite getting to work at 6:30am every day ...but I have a great relationship with our custodian - we're the only two people there at that hour.
• I spend a lot of money out of pocket on games and therapy materials ...but at least they now belong to me.
• A lot of my students' progress is slow ...but at least they're making progress.
• There are a lot of difficult parents ...but for every difficult parent there are 10 that are great to work with.
• Most of my students don't follow through with their homework ...but I have to buy fewer special toys for the homework prizebox.
• Some IEPs are extremely stressful ...but I am part of a super supportive special ed team.
• There are still 79 days of school left ...but then we get a 10-week long summer break!
• My summer will likely be spent teaching Extended School Year to make ends meet ...but it's only half-days!
• My TpT store isn't turning as much of a profit as I had hoped given all the hours I've put into making materials ...but it pays the phone bill.
• Most of my weekends are spent doing something work-related ...but I won't have to scramble as much during the week.
• I'm not always sure that my students will generalize their skills ...but we have a super supportive general education team at our site.
• All of us on teacher salaries are drastically underpaid ...but at least I'm still new enough to the district where I move up a little bit on the payscale each year and get to look forward to a raise.
• Sometimes my students make me cry ...but more often, they make me laugh.
• My Speech room is too small to store my things ...but at least I won't lose anything.
• I don't have time to plan sessions ...but I usually come up with something anyway.
• And most importantly: if I had not become an SLP I would not have met my Master clinician during my school-based internship who has become my best friend.

These are just a few of the things we face, but with some effort you can put a new spin on  almost all of them. Looking at it from a different angle really does help. It is nice to feel motivated again to jump right back into things!

Reading over this again now, I realize that all of these things are total first world problems. Life really isn't so bad!

~Viola

Holiday Speech Craftivity

This holiday season I am trying to incorporate more crafts so that the kids actually get to make something to take home. In the past I have often cringed at doing artsy projects since I was always worried that precious speech time would get wasted gluing/cutting, etc., so I am trying to find crafts that involve fewer of these components. After scouring the internet, I found a really cute little project: beaded wreath ornaments! I thought I'd share how I used this idea to maximize productions during our session. 

Wreath ornaments.

First off, you will need to gather the materials (all of them are available on amazon.com): 

• red chenille  stems (pipe cleaner)
• green tri-beads 
• red or white (or both) round faceted beads (mine were 8mm)
• little silver and golden bells
• wire

Next, I prepared two different types of "gift tags" to be attached to the ornament at the end. For these, I typed a message in Microsoft Word, printed it out, and glued it on a die-cut tree shape. One tag was for my artic students, and one for those working on language/fluency targets:

Artic & Language gift tags.

I also created "visual instructions" for my younger students, so that they could grasp the pattern of the beading.

Visual instructions.

Now we were ready to get started! Each student was required to "earn" their beads. The price per bead was either 10 productions of a target word or a language-based activity (e.g., answering a Wh-question, providing a descriptive detail about a picture, making a sentence about a verb card, and so on). The patterning for these wreaths consists of 3 green tri beads followed by a round faceted bead. My wreaths had 5 faceted beads each until we attached the bell.

Since each wreath consists of about 23 beads (you can add more if desired), I got about 230 productions out of each artic student. To make sure we could get this done in a 30 minute session, I had larger groups practice chorally in unison. As they earned their beads, they got to string it onto the pipe cleaner. This was a nice opportunity for my younger students to work on sequencing and patterning as well.

One of my Kindergarteners at work.

All of my students (including preschoolers) were able to master the fine motor component of this project (I should note that I have not done this with my lower functioning SDC kids, many of whom have OT services) and had a lot of fun. One of my 1st grade artic students even noted, "I wish we could do this every week instead of work." 

As the very last step, I helped the kids tie a bow at the top (all of them needed help with this part) and attach the gift tag to the the ornament.

The finished product!

At the end the kids got to take it home! Definitely a quick and fun activity to get into the holiday spirit. I surely will be doing this again (or something similar) next year!

~Viola

TpT Freebie: Holiday Articulation Dots

My TpT Freebie this month is an articulation craftivity similar to the Jack-O-Lantern project that I did with my students back in October. You will get a pre-made template featuring a Gingerbread man to let your students practice their speech sounds while coloring in the picture dot-by-dot. My students had a lot of fun with this, so I wanted to make sure to make it available to everyone. You can download it here.

Holiday Articulation Dots - get it here.

~Viola