Pump It Up:: Balloon Pumps

It's almost time to  find the summer clearance sales. I wanted to share an easy idea that students and SLPs will both love!  I used this all the time in a clinic I used to work at and last summer I bought my own balloon pump in the end of summer clearance! 

Go visit your local Big Box Store and find one of these air balloon pumps. They will be under $10 full price and pretty soon you'll find them marked way down! 

These pumps work for both air and water. We used them this week for water balloons, but for typical therapy you'll just pump air into the balloons! 

The pump requires about 15 pumps of the handle to get enough force to blow up a small balloon. During therapy I use this as a token reinforcement system. The child completes X amount of trials with the a fun deck and then earns a pump or two! 

Once you've pumped it all the way up, you'll pull the trigger to inflate the balloon! 

Super fun and super easy for therapy! Have you used this idea before?

Color Book: A favorite Resource.

I love it when I find a simple book that works wonders. I got more milage out of this 99 cent color book than I did out of anything else this year. 

It's actually a Reader's Digest book published in 2000. The link is at the bottom of the page to find it used on Amazon. Instead of 'Lift the Flap' it's a 'Match the Flap' book. 

The book has big pages with nouns for each color. The inside of the book has a secondary flaps that are different colors. Students flip over the interior flaps to find the match to the exterior. In the picture below you can see that I matched the orange color to the orange pictures! 

So why is it amazing for my preschool crowd? It's ideal for receptively and expressively identifying nouns. I used it a ton for labeling with two words. For example, 'orange crayon, orange popsicle'. I love it because the kids can touch the orange word and then touch the noun. It's perfect and the kids think they're reading! 

I've also used it for functions and associations with the vocabulary. My fluency preschoolers worked on making sentences (The carrot is orange.) My articulation kiddos working on s-blends said, "I spy" sentences. 

I'm in LOVE with this book!  Have you used anything similar?!

3 for ME! {artic carryover idea}

Articulation carryover has to be one of the most difficult skills we teach during speech and language intervention. Here's a quick idea I use a lot. It originally came from my graduate school friends Dayna and Megan.  Start your next session by giving each of your students 3 magical gold coins. Really 3 of anything will work (bingo chips, pictures, pennies, etc.) but I took this picture during March and had these coins on hand!

The goal, is the for the student to keep all of their coins across the session. In this session, my student was reading cards while I listened for good /r/ sounds. If the student says a word with an /r/ produced incorrectly and didn't self-correct, I took a coin. 

Of course you could use this same idea to work on other skills. I've used it for pronoun carryover this month, so if a student makes a error in conversational speech with subjective and possessive pronouns, I took a coin. I also usually start with around 5 or 6 coins with students just learning to work on carryover. You don't want the student to run out of coins in the first 5 minutes of speech!

At the end of our session, if the student had any coins left, they earned an extra star on their chart.  If I got all their coins (3 for me!) then they had an extra sheet of homework go home.

This has been super motivating for my students and helps us work on carryover. How have you worked on carryover with your students?