Guest Post: Spring Related Materials!!

Today, I have a guest post from Tatyana Elleseff M.A. CCC-SLP about spring related therapy materials!

Tatyana Elleseff MA CCC-SLP is a bilingual SLP with a full time hospital affiliation as well as private practice in Central, NJ. She specializes in working with multicultural, internationally and domestically adopted as well as at-risk children with complex communication disorders. She presents workshops for a number of medical, academic, and non-profit organizations and writes articles for various specialized publications.  For more information visit her website and blog @ www.smartspeechtherapy.com/blog/

Keywords: therapy materials, language delay, language stimulation, listening comprehension,  play, preschoolers, school-age, resource websites, speech language pathology

Therapy Fun with Ready Made Spring Related Bingo

Spring is just around the corner and there are many fun therapy activities you can do with your preschool and school aged clients during that time of year.  Now, while many of my colleagues are great at creating their own therapy materials, I am personally not that handy.  If you are like me, it’s perfectly okay since there are plenty of free materials that you can find online and adopt for your speech language purposes.

Making Friends, an online craft store, and Boggles World, an online ESL teacher resource, are two such websites, which have a number of ready-made materials, crafts, flashcards, and worksheets that can be adapted for speech language therapy purposes.  One of my personal favorites from both sites is bingo. I actually find it to be a pretty versatile activity, which can be used in a number of different ways in the speech room.

Let’s start with “Spring” bingo from the Making Friends Website, since its well suited for preschool aged children.  The game comes with both call-out cards and 12-4x4 card printable boards that can be printed out on card stock or just laminated.

Spring vocabulary words include: kite, butterfly, birdhouse, bird, birdbath, watering can, pink flowers, yellow flower, blue flower, flower basket, potted plant, spotted egg, yellow egg, rain, raincoat, umbrella, galoshes, bunny, Easter basket, wheelbarrow, bonnet, gloves, clippers, shovel, spade.

Next up are the “Insects and Bugs” as well as “Parts of Plants and Trees” from Boggles World, suitable for school-aged children.  Both come with call-out cards as well as 3×3 and 4×4 card generator/boards. Clicking the refresh button will generate as many cards as you need, so the supply is endless! You can copy and paste the entire bingo board into a word document, resize it and then print it out on reinforced paper or just laminate it.

“Insects and Bugs” vocabulary words include: ant, bee, fly, ladybug, beetle, moth, butterfly, dragonfly, grasshopper, cricket, flea, mosquito, caterpillar, firefly, stick bug, termite, cockroach, praying mantis, worm, spider, centipede, horsefly, stink bug, wasp, cicada 

“Parts of Plants and Trees” vocabulary words include: berries, branch, bush, cone, flower, vine, fruit, grass, leaves, needles, nut, plant, roots, seed, thorn, tree, trunk, bark, blossom, bud, bulb, canopy, grains, sprout, reed, stump

Now the fun begins!

Here are some suggested activities:

Phonological Awareness:

§  Practice Rhyming words (you can do discrimination and production activities): fly/flea, bunny/funny, cone/comb

§  Practice Syllable and Phoneme Segmentation  (I am going to say a word (e.g., wheelbarrow, galoshes, berries,  etc) and I want you to clap one time for each syllable or sound I say)

§  Practice Isolation of initial, medial, and final phonemes in words ( e.g., What is the beginning/final  sound in branch, nut, plant, etc?) What is the middle sound in root, seed, moth, etc?

§  Practice Initial and Final Syllable as well as Phoneme Deletion in Words  (Say cricket! Now say it without the et, what do you have left? Say beetle, now say it without the /b/ what is left; say bird, now say it without the /d/, what is left?)

Articulation/Fluency:

§  Practice production of select sounds/consonant clusters that you are working on or just production at word or sentence levels with those clients who just need a little bit more work in therapy increasing their intelligibility or sentence fluency.

Language:

§  Practice Categorization skills via convergent and divergent naming activities: Name Spring words, Name Insects, How many trees which grow flowers can you name?

§  Practice naming Associations: what goes with a flower (watering can), what goes with a berry (bush)

§  Practice providing Attributes via naming category, function, location, parts, size, shape, color, composition, as well as accessory/necessity.  For example, (I see a fly. It’s an insect. You find it outside or inside. It’s black and is the size of a bee.

§  Practice providing Definitions: Tell me what a butterfly is. Tell me what a shovel is.

§  Practice naming Similarities and Differences among semantically related items: How are dragonfly and ladybug alike? How are they different?

§  Practice explaining Multiple Meaning words:   What are some meanings of the word fly, bug, branch, plant, etc?

§  Practice Complex Sentence Formulation: make up a sentence with the words birdbath and unless, make up a sentence with the words wheelbarrow and however, etc.

§  Or you can just make up your own receptive, expressive and social pragmatic language activities to go along with these games.

So join in the fun and start playing!