We used my big white board, a few baseball foam cutouts and dry erase markers! I love an activity that is easy to store :)
The first step is to make some EET baseballs. You will need 7. I used these yellow foam cutouts. I'm pretty sure they came from the Dollar Tree, but they were from last year. I drew the prompts on each baseball!
The set up looks like this. To score points, students have to use at least 4 of the 7 descriptors. They have to get a 'homerun' to score! You can see some of the vocab we described today in red above. It was all baseball themed.
For our game I made the 'Green Group' and 'Blue Do' prompts mandatory. We worked on developing a sentence similar to this: " A COACH is a type of PERSON that HELPS KIDS LEARN TO PLAY BALL." "A HELMET is a type of SPORTS EQUIPMENT that PROTECTS YOUR HEAD." We were focusing on answering the category and function descriptions in a natural sentence.
Next they got to pick 2 more prompts to finish their description and pass 3rd base/home plate. I set a cue level before the game. This week it was 3 cues - while I introduced the activity. They knew they could get 3 prompts/explanations and still earn their point by getting around all the bases! That basically meant I helped with the first 3 bases and they did the 4th independently. Next time we play I will give them two prompts and then we'll keep reducing it until we're independently scoring home runs!
I was surprised at how difficult it was for them to transfer their learning to this new format! It's always good to practice in new ways and this reminded me that just because they can use the skill is some formats, it won't necessarily carryover independently! Don't forget to have the EET strand out on the table to help them connect what they are familiar with to the new format!
Are you using the EET in your speech room? Are you doing anything baseball themed?
