Cars Articulation and Language Activities

My latest speech and language activity is all about Cars! The Cars movies are such a hit with my students. Especially the preschool to 2nd grade crowd. The 3-5th graders act like they don't care, but always willingly play my games! I originally made this activity to work on phonics back in graduate school. This year I updated it and made three different versions. All the games are made to be played just like Uno. You need to match a number or color (Car's character) to make a play!

Grab WH questions HERE!

The first version is a WH questions game. Each game car has a WH question that the student must answer before they take their turn.

Grab Multiple Meaning Words HERE.

The second version is meant for older students. It's an activity focusing on multiple meaning words. Each card contains a word (ie: broke) that can have two meanings. The students need to name both definitions or use them in sentences to show meaning before taking their turn.

Grab Make your Own HERE.

The third version is the one I use for articulation. It's blank! Woohoo for you. That means you can add articulation, grammar, or language targets. If you're a teacher you could add, letters, sight words or number sentences. ANYTHING! For my students I often just print a black and white version. We can spend one whole session making their own personal sets of cards. We practice their targets while they are filling them out on their cards. Then we trace the numbers in color while practicing them again. Then the second day in therapy we play their own game. Then we send it home for practice. It motivates my some of my little ones that their homework is to play Uno with mom or dad.


I also made with quick reinforcer game that I play with my preschoolers.

Grab the game HERE.

Students just take turns drawing cards. If they get a vehicle, they keep it. If they pull a flat tire card, they put 2 cards back. If they pull a gas station, they get a boost, and take an extra turn.

Hope you can use these! If you do make sure you Pin then or share them with a friend!

Speech & Language Valentine's Apps

Yesterday I shared with you the paper activities I'm using this February. Today I'm sharing with you a few ideas for incorporating the ipad.

Have you seen the Image Spinner App? It's a great 99 cent app that I heard about HERE from a fellow blogger. It's an awesome app where you import pictures, add your own voice recording and VIOLA! In 30 seconds you have made yourself a spinner game!

The way I'm using the app is to work on idioms for carryover after teaching my first idioms lesson seen HERE. After we introduce the idioms and make our wreaths, we can follow up the next session with the activity with the image spinner. I added the pictures from that activity into a simple document.

Grab your free download HERE.

To get the pictures into your spinner. Email yourself the document you downloaded above. Open it in to each picture. Pinch to zoom and make the pictures big. Take a screen shot picture of each one. (clicking and holding to save wouldn't work for them on this one.) Open image spinner, add each picture and click the red button to record the idiom.


One other app I have introduced HERE, was the Make Dice App.

This week I added 'valentine verbs' to the dice and some other lovey-dovery adjectives! Easy!


I also searched to see what was out there, that might be valentines related that was free! Here's what I came up with:

3 apps for coloring:

Kids Fingerpainting- Valentines

Holiday Draw Galore 

 Valentines Coloring Book


AND ONE MEMORY GAME:

That memory game Valentine's Edition



Leave me a comment with any different Valentine's Day themed apps you find!

Valentines Day in the Speech Room

It's coming up on February. As if you didn't know by cruising around Pinterest these days! Here are a few things we've been doing in the Speech Room!

Positional Concept Hearts

I made these quick hearts to use with preschool - 2nd graders. They each have a positional concept on them . I passed them out to my kiddos and they  demonstrate the concepts. They particularly enjoyed demonstrating 'above' Ms. Rayburn's head :) Lots of giggles. For my older kiddos, I added two step directions (ex: Place one heart on the corner of the ipad, and the other heart between 2 mirrors.)

Grab it Here!!


Find it Articulation Game

I printed several  copies of this game. I let the kids pick either pink or red. Then I gave them a pack of articulation cards. As the child flipped over each card they said their target and then looked for the color on their heart anywhere on the articulation card. If they find the color on their heart, they make a tally mark. Every articulation card (or language card!) they say, gives them a chance to find their color. The person with the most tally marks at the end was the winner. I laminated my heart sheets and that way I could wipe off the maker after each session.

Grab it HERE!!


Articulation and Language Wreaths

Two materials: Three activities. Grab a box of paper plates and some construction paper. Cut out about a zillion hearts with the ellison machine. You will get two parts of the heart (the inside and the outer part). I had my students write their articulation and language targets on the inner hearts. We used 10 each, and added them to the paper plate to create a simple wreath. 

The wreath above was an S-blends wreath I made for one of my examples. 

This is a heart - venn diagram that a student and I made comparing and contrasting rose and daisy flowers.

And here's a quick activity I did with another student! She is working on categories and wrote 5 types of Valentine's candy in her heart.

Figurative Language

I asked on our Facebook page (if you aren't a follower.. see the box on the right side!) what you wanted to see targeted for Valentine's day. Well most of you asked for Figurative Language or middle/HS activities. I only work with kiddos up to 5th grade so I stuck with idioms. 

Above is an Idioms wreath that I made with my kiddos. I picked several love/heart themed idioms to add to our wreath.

My kids didn't really know any of the idioms I tried to use, so I made them booklet for their reference. It took us a couple sessions to make these wreaths. The kids copied the idioms to their hearts. Before they could add it to the wreath, they needed to explain it to me, without referencing the example book! 

You can grab it HERE at TPT!

Developing Questions

The last activity that I created targets question generation. First I went to Dollar tree and grabbed some small foam hearts for a buck. Then on each heart, I added the answer the questions. (ex: 'on Friday', ' the nurse with red hair', ' my uncle bob') Just write answers that will have your kids generating all different types of WH/ DO and yes/no questions. Make sure your kids are using the little words correctly. For example if the card says 'to Disney' and 'at Disney' you will need different types of questions. The student reads the 'answer' heart and then develops an appropriate question. On the back write random numbers. If the student answers correctly - they earn that many points. (I used mostly 2's with a few 0's and a few 10's.)

My kids needed a visual cue card. I added the WH words and some notes on a white card as we went. You could make a visual with boardmaker as well if they really needed it. 

Made sure you check out my Pinterest board and other other blogs on my blogroll. Tons of great ideas out there! I've been downloading lots of create ideas! 

Happy Valentine's Day! 

Crazy Cat Lady?

Just popping in to show you this cute little FREE app. This week in preschool I am reading Cookie's Week. It's a cute little book about Cookie the kitty. Cookie gets into a lot of trouble and even though it's a short little book it gets plenty of giggles.

I was looking for an app to use with my cat story and found a very cute one! So cute I thought I would share it! This app is called Cat Effects . This app is totally goofy. Have I mentioned that I don't like cats? I am just a dog person... but these guys are really cute.

You take a picture or upload a picture and then get crazy adding some cats to it! So this is our preschool room. You touch a little cat in the corner. Then this sheet of cats pops up. You pick a cat and drag it into your picture.

Enter in the speech and language portion of your time! This is where we were working on following directions (Put a white cat in the window and a black cat on the shelf.)  My older kiddos, placed the cats and then gave me sentences to describe where they were. We got lots of cats into the circle above!

Things even got a little silly with this friend! We were working on INSIDE and OUTSIDE ... so we put cats inside and outside of her mouth!

Grab this free app and use it for some silliness in your lessons! What are your favorite apps?

Back Pocket Monsters: Inferences & Plurals

Back Pocket Monsters is a game I dreamed up back in graduate school. I first made a version of it when I was doing student teaching and I pulled out my old file and re-vamped it at the beginning of this year! I thought I would share it with you today and hope you can use it this week! 

In this game, students each get a pocket! Little monsters like to live in these pockets. Every time your student answers the questions correctly, they add another monster to their pocket. But watch out! Little boys like to bust those monsters and throw them out of their pockets! 

The first version targets some basic inferencing skills. I have been using them with both my articulation and language kiddos. 

Grab the INFERENCES version here.

I also made a version of this game that focuses on irregular plurals. 

Your student has to name the plural for each word they pick! But watch out for those little boys!

Grab a copy of IRREGULAR PLURALS here! 

Make Dice App

Lot's of ice and snow in Ohio this weekend. Why we only get snow on the weekends is beyond me. We had a half inch of ice this weekend and it's going to be 47 tomorrow. But I'm hoping snow days will be in my future.

Until then I'm here today to show you a new app I downloaded this week. It's called Make Dice.

It's a cheap app that you can use with all your groups! It was 99 cents when I purchased this app and I've already used it enough to make it worth it!

The app does just what it sounds like. Let's you write on the sides of a die and then just press a button or shake the ipad to roll them. You can make dice for anything! A few ways I've already used it:

Prepositions - the kids rolled on and then moved in the room to make their body act it out and say a sentence to explain  (I am below the table.)

Synonyms/Antonyms: I wrote words and they had to say the syn/ant of the word they rolled.

Vocabulary: I added curriculum vocab and the kids defined it and used it in sentences.

Irregular Plurals: I added the singular and they name the irregular plural.

Articulation: This a no brainer! Add words and go!

Student names: I added the names of my kids in their groups! They like seeing their name on the dice!

For my artic carryover group I made this die. It has things like make up a story, make up a tongue twister, rap, sing, etc. They need to make something up or retell a familiar story that has their target sound. Once they get laughing and thinking about making up a little rap - they stop paying attention to their sounds. It makes for great practice.

Overall it's a neat little app that I've been using to get my kids warmed up and in the swing of things at the beginning of therapy, when I have 5 minutes left over in a session, or when I need a second to write data or a note to a parent. Hope you can use it too!

Grammar Sandwiches

Today I wanted to share a few activities I have been doing in my speech room. They are both grammar activities for kids in early elementary. You can turn your speech room into a sandwich shop!

First Up.... PB&J!

This card game focuses on irregular verbs. I also use it in groups where I have kids working on sentence production and articulation carryover.

Students can play the game like 'Go-fish' or like 'Memory.' I take the wilds out of mine usually - but they're included in case you want to use them!

Grab it for free HERE.


The other sandwich game that we are playing is one that works on sentence generation as well as grammar. It's called That's Bologna!

Every sandwich needs 2 pieces of bread ( the subject and verb). From there adding toppings just adds points! Pieces of bologna are conjunctions and the tomatoes are adjectives. The more pieces of sandwich they use to make a sentence, the more points they earn!

When I introduce the game, I just lay out a few types of toppings. As students get used to using the variety of words to make sentences that make sense, I add in other pieces. To engage the other students in the group we yell 'That's Bologna" when we hear a sentence that isn't grammatically correct, or doesn't make sense!

Grab your copy HERE.


I hope you get some use out of our sandwich games! Leave a comment or pin it if you do!