A Blizzard of Winter Activities

I can't believe December is here already! You know what that means! Pull out the gloves, hats, scarves, and hot chocolate. Oh, and lots of fun winter speech activities. If you need some help with that, never fear! I am putting all my recent and past winter activities here in one place for your convenience. 

PSSTTT: READ ALL THE WAY DOWN!

1. Complex Emotion Crackers: This activity will help your older students recognize more complex emotions. 

2. Healthy Voice Habits with Randy Reindeer (free): Help Randy Reindeer decide what's healthy and unhealthy for his voice. Best part? It's free.

3. Holiday Describing Fun (free): Your students will love describing objects in order to trim the tree and it's free!

4. Holly Jolly Language: This packet contains activities to work on plurals, pronouns, problem identification, categories, opposite concepts, and word finding. Plus, it's great for Christmas or Hanukkah!

5. Multisyllabic Reindeer (free): Target multisyllabic words with this cute reindeer freebie. Each card has the number of syllables shown with reindeer heads to give your kids a nice visual.

6. Polar Bear Pragmatics: This activity focuses on topic initiation, topic maintenance, appropriate responses, emotions, and tone of voice. The polar bears make it an engaging way to work on these skills.

7. Polar Bear Problem Solving: This activity focuses on problem identification, problem avoidance, and problem solving with those same adorable polar bears.

8. Prediction Presents: Students listen to clues to predict what's in each present. Categories include animals, school, sports, food, house, transportation, occupations, and clothing.

9. Stick It In A Hat Short Vowel Sort (free): work on sight words or help students who have difficult with short vowels or CVC words. 

10. Check It Twice: One of my newest products that targets inferences, reasoning skills, and ability to recall details. Your students have to help the elves figure out which gifts go to while child before they have to be delivered!

11. Snowman, Snowman, What Will You Wear? Mini book and speech/language activities: This is another of my newest products and I'm super excited about it. It includes a 12 page printable mini-book and a wealth of other activities, plus HW pages! 

There you have it! I'm sure I'll be making some more winter themed activities, but this should give you a great start when planning your activities! 

First one to comment with your email wins your choice of one of these products! 

Speech-ified Holiday Songs/Poems Linky

To kick off the holiday season, I thought it would be a fun idea to do a Speech-ifed Holiday Songs/Poems Linky Party! CC of Super Power Speech is great at this type of thing, so check out some of her poems here. If you would like to participate, here's what you do: take any holiday themed song or poem and speech-ify the lyrics. The image for this link is below:

Here is my speechified version of the 12 Days of Christmas: 

What's In My TpT Cart Linky!

It's that time again folks! The Cyber Monday and Tuesday sale is on 12/2 and 12/3. My whole TpT store is 20% off and don't forget to use the code CYBER to get a total of 28% off. Jenna is throwing this linky so that we can see what is in everyone else's carts and get some great ideas for things we may have missed.

I have some clip art items in there, but I want to focus on the materials. Here are my top contenders:

1. Flip Cards for Apraxia from Kathy Grover: I have some little preschoolers who need to work on CV words, so this will fit the bill.

2. Interactive Sentence Structure, Word Order & Sentence Lesson from Amy Minor: I have some upper elementary students who really need to work on producing more complex sentences. Plus, I can use this on my iPad. Score!

3. Following Complex Temporal Directions from Denise Polley: The CELF. Enough said.

4. Holiday Listening for Details from Miss Speechie: So many of my students need to work on this!

5. CVC Words Ice Cream Scoops from Expressly Speaking: Several of my preschoolers are working on final consonants. 

6. Receptive and Expressive Language Baselines from Miss Speechie: A great tool to have at your fingertips!

I guarantee I will end up buying more or changing my mind, but for right now this is what's in my cart! What's in yours?!?!

2013 Edublog Nominations

Edublog gives different blogs annually awards based on other bloggers' nominations and then voting. I can only hope to one day be among those nominated, but for now I'd love to celebrate some of my fellow bloggers.  Below are my nominations in some of the categories:

Best individual blog: Playing With Words 365

Best group blog: Speechie Freebies 

Best student blog: Speechy Musings

Best ed tech/resource sharing blog: PrAACtical AAC 

Most influential blog post of the year: Dear Your Honor (Again)

I wish I could just nominate all the wonderful SLP bloggers I've met through this endeavor! I am in love with blogging and sharing products with SLPs near and far. I can't wait to see who wins!

A-HA Moment: Invitation App

Haven't had one of my A-HA moments in awhile, so one was bound to happen soon. The other day, I was thinking about different ways to target WH questions. Sometimes I get bored (gasp) with my apps and other activities that target these types of questions. I was perusing the app store aimlessly, looking for something fun and interesting and stumbled upon this gem: Leo's Card & Invitation Maker. Best part? It's free. 

As you can see in the picture below, you have the choice to make a card or an invitation. For my purposes, I chose make an invitation.

You are taken to this page where you can add stickers and/or draw something. This would be a great way to work on requesting! When you're done, you ring the bell in the top right hand corner of the page.

You are taken to this page, where the WH magic can happen! The picture you created from the first page is now on the right side of the "invitation." You can now work on answering functional WH questions. Have your students pretend they are throwing the party by answering the following questions:

What is the name of your party?

Why are you having a party?

Who is hosting the party?

When will your party be?

When does the party start? 

When does the party end?

Where is the party taking place?

What message should you add to let people know more about the party?

The invitations are saved in the gallery. If you return to the home screen and choose "View Gallery," you can see past invitations. I like to make one to use as an example and we practice answering the WH questions from an already made invitation before making others.

Disclaimer: I was not asked by the developer to review this app. I found it useful and decided to post my own independent review!

Do you think you'll try out this app?

Love It and List It Linky

This month's Love It and List It from Speech Room News features articulation apps. Here are my picks:

1. Speech Therapy for Apraxia: I like to use this one for my young kids who are working at that CV level or who might have several errors. It's a simple app, but effective with these littler ones. I just recently saw they have a word level one as well, which I might end up purchasing!

Below you can see the different sounds you can focus on, plus there are multiple levels. 

2. Pocket SLP The R App: This is great for my older students who are working on /r/. It's simple and works well for drilling this sound!

3. Articulate It from Smarty Ears: I wrote a review about this one a little while ago. It's all inclusive and amazing. Read more about this one here.

4.  Pocket SLP Tell Me A Story: This app does double duty. After listening to a story, the student can retell it. Great for language building, but also for carryover practice.

5. Finally, this isn't an app. I frequently use the video function on my iPad and just record the student. We listen to it and rate how it sounded!

What do you use? Make sure to check out the recommendations of other SLP bloggers by checking out Jenna's post here!

Peek At My Week 11/22

We are quickly approaching Thanksgiving break! 

This week, the theme centered around turkeys! 

For my younger kiddos, I used the turkey from The Speech Bubble's cute turkey craft (found here). We read this cute book from Expressly Speaking called My Hungry Turkey (found here). I decided to use the turkey's stomach as sort of an Old Lady activity. As we read through the book, I had the kids draw in what the turkey ate. Then we retold the story - they especially loved the last part and yelled "Yuck!" quite loudly. Please excuse my very poor drawings, I never claimed to be someone who could draw! If the kids were working on articulation, we wrote words with their sound on the feathers. 

I also used Super Power Speech's Thanksgiving Mad Libs (found here) with my older kids. It was good to get their creative juices flowing with parts of speech. Before we even did the activity, we brainstormed lists of nouns, verbs, and adjectives. They got a kick out of the funny stories at the end of the session! 

My 2nd graders are working on non-fiction in their classrooms, so I thought it was a perfect opportunity to read about the first Thanksgiving, so I used this article from ReadWorks. We worked on comprehension questions and summarizing. 

I had my first of two observations this week. It was a little nerve-wracking, but it went well! Have turkeys invaded your speech room yet?!