Speech Path

 A road-themed activity my students loved!

Brrrrr! It has been so cold in Iowa the past couple days. Temps below zero overnight and single-digit highs. At least we got a little snow on Sunday because if it's this cold, I would rather there be snow on the ground. Call me crazy.

I was sitting by the fireplace wearing two long-sleeve shirts, fuzzy socks, and snuggling under a blanket trying to stay warm last night when I came across this story-telling path on Pinterest, I immediately loved the idea and knew it was something I could modify and apply with my students who are working on all sorts of different goals.

I took a long piece of bulletin board paper and drew a path down the middle. At one end I wrote START and at the other end I wrote STOP, because I have a lot of students who are working on their /s/ sound.

All of my students were intrigued with our new activity as soon as they walked into the room. And the nice thing about this is that it is open-ended and easy to modify with students of all abilities and goal areas.

LANGUAGE:
*Like the original post, this path is a great idea for addressing story telling, oral narrative skills, and identifying story grammar elements. I set the visual story grammar reminders along the road, students proceeded down the path and collected the elements as they listened to the story, and then at the end of the road they needed to use those visuals to retell the story.

*Sentence Production: I had three piles of cards - People/Animals, Actions, and Locations - and students collected the cards as they walked down the path. At the end of the road they had to use the three cards to make a sentence.

*WH-Questions: I placed WH-questions along the road for students to answer as they traveled down the road.

ARTICULATION:
*For my students working on their phonemes at the single word level, I placed cards with their target sound all along the path. As they walked, they picked up a card and produced the word. If they missed on, they had to start over! For some students I also added point values to the cards. The farther they got down the path, the more points they racked up.

*For students working at the sentence level, we placed three cards with their target sound along the road. Once they collected the cards they used all three of them in one sentence.

FLUENCY:
*Draw a smooth, straight road, and a curvy, bumpy road. Students practice their easy onset speech on the smooth road, and address bumpy speech on the other path.

Leave a Comment: What is your favorite story to use for story retelling?