2015 Speech Therapy Room Tour (Part 2)

a tour of my second therapy room this year

While one of my therapy rooms is full of soft muted colors, the room at my other school is bright, bright, bright! This is a classroom that I share with the special education teacher at this school. We work together with students in Kindergarten through 5th grade. The room can get pretty hectic with students, teachers, paraeducators, and the occasional student needing to visit the reset room, but it's fun! Take a look around:

This is the view as you walk into the room. As you can see, we are blessed to share a full-size classroom. The special education teacher works on the right side (with the blue rug and kidney table), and I work on the left side (by the windows). My roommate took the lead with the decorating, and I followed suit using the same color scheme. I love the bright green and black!

This is a close-up picture of my work area. I mainly work with students at the small rectangular table, but we sometimes overflow onto the round table. The game board under the window that says "We are stars!" is my reinforcement system. Students all colored their own stars, and each time they come to speech/language they get a chance to move their star one spot closer to the coveted prize space.

My desk area contains binders of printables used most often. The four file trays near the front allow me to keep materials I need for that week ready to go near the therapy table.

Behind the green curtain is where I keep all my therapy games, and the doors under the windows slide open for additional storage for articulation cards, etc. I made my own bulletin board between the windows by stapling bulletin board paper/border and nailing thumbtacks into the wall to store task cards and materials on binder rings. You can also see one of my all-time most often used therapy items - Articulation Cans (LOVE them!).

Finally, the view towards the back of the room. We arranged a bunch of file cabinets to have a little break area in between (you can see this area in the first picture - it's full of cushions and visuals to calm down), but that left me with a big blank file cabinet to stare at. So I taped up some fabric and created another "bulletin board". This one is magnetic! I keep a "Mystery Object" of the week up there, and sometimes attach articulation pictures on the bottom half for target practice. The blue curtain in the back of the room hides a reset room, and a bathroom :D

That's it! Let me know if you have any questions or comments below. Thanks for reading!

2015 Speech Therapy Room Tour (Part 1)

come see how I set up one of two therapy rooms I share this year

The new school year brought a lot of changes to my assignment this year. Instead of working full-time in one building, my assignment is now split between two buildings within my district. I spend 40% of my time (2 days per week) at the same school I was at last year, but I moved from 3rd-8th grades down to Preschool and Kindergarten. I had to change rooms, and this meant going from a full-size classroom all by myself, to sharing a room with the occupational therapist. Come see how it's turned out!

This is the view when you walk into the room. The OT has all her stuff on the other half. (The bookcase with the pinwheels is the divider.) I chose teal, apple green, and pink as the main colors, with snippets of orange throughout.

To the left of the doorway there is a narrow storage area. Two 2-door cupboards, a bookshelf, and this shelf set with paper cubbies. I keep handouts and homework pages for each speech sound and many other therapy targets stored there. It makes grabbing practice sheets quick and easy for this last-minute-planner.

Continuing around the room, there is a bookshelf where I keep therapy books. I also have a small whiteboard in this corner.

In the center of the room is an interactive white board. I added some positive quotes around it to try and cover up the green chalkboard peeking out. Did it work?

My one bulletin board is brightly decorated, but holds minimal items at the present time (including FREE Speech Sound Banners!). I was planning on hanging a bunch of my materials that are on rings, but they were too heavy and I couldn't get them to stay hanging on the bulletin board! Any ideas? Underneath the bulletin board I have milk crates holding all my picture books, pockets with artic cards, and my precious laminator.

On the other side of the room are file cabinets full of student files, testing materials, and themed/seasonal therapy materials. Three bookcases full of goodies also help form the divider between my half of the room and the OT's side. You can see her therapy balls peeking out behind the tallest bookshelf. I sewed a curtain for the shelf that held the games, but I think I need to add a second curtain to cover the tallest bookshelf too. All those fun toys are right at eye level for my 3-year-olds! By the way, I bought a clearance set of sheets from Target and used that for the curtain material. Yards and yards of material for $8!

I. love. having. windows! The sun shines in during the morning and it's so cozy. The windows look out onto a small courtyard that is between two wings of the building. It's been nice to see the leaves changing! A simple fabric garland and leftover wedding lanterns decorate the windows. I also crafted up some pinwheels and a banner for my desk. Plants are also something I love having in my therapy room. They just seem to make things a little more homey.

Desk organization: student working folders on the left, office supplies in front, sticky note command center next to my chair. Don't forget family photos on your desk!

That's it! Any questions?

Spring Bulletin Board

a bright and eye-catching bulletin board idea for the spring season

I spent the better part of three days in late March designing and assembling the parts for this bulletin board display:

This board is in the hallway right outside my therapy room. I've had the same display on it since the beginning of the school year:

It was fading a lot and I was just ready for an upgrade to get me through the remaining two months of the school year. I was also hoping for something that would remind people that speech-language pathologists work on more than just speech sounds.

The light blue background is a tablecloth from the dollar store, the rainbow is made out of construction paper, and everything else was cut out of bulletin board paper from school.

I love how it turned out!

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Abby is still waiting for spring to arrive (and STAY) in North Dakota.

Paper Airplane Activities

paper airplanes can be used to target many communication goals

This week we have been making paper airplanes, and it has been a blast! A quick Google search led me to three different websites with step-by-step instructions.

I found this website to be the best because it includes printable pages with the fold lines numbered which I found really helped my students understand exactly where to make their folds.

So how in the world can you use paper airplanes to target communication goals? So. Many. Ways. :)

FOLLOWING DIRECTIONS:
- how to fold the airplane
- how to fly the airplane

EXPRESSIVE LANGUAGE:
- giving instructions and providing details in their descriptions
- prepositions ("The plane flew OVER the table.")
- pronouns ("YOUR plane flew farther than MY plane.")
- sizes/measurement ("The BIG plane flew a LONG WAY!"; "This time make the LITTLE plane have a SHORT flight.")

SEQUENCING: All of these planes include step-by-step instructions. Cut apart the instructions and have students put the steps in order.

ARTICULATION:
- Spread target words on the floor and try to fly the airplanes onto the cards
- Write target sounds and words onto the completed planes

COMPARE/CONTRAST:
- discuss similarities/differences about different styles of airplanes
- fly two different airplanes and compare their flight patterns

FLUENCY: Students can read the instructions aloud and practice their fluency building strategies as they do so.

FINE MOTOR SKILLS: All this folding and holding is great practice for our friends working on their fine motor skills.

Students are so proud when they're finished:

And then you get to enjoy the thrill of flying them!

Try it!
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Abby thinks the Bullet plane is the best for speed and distance, but the Condor does sweet tricks.

Speech Room Records {Bulletin Board}

a functional and motivating bulletin board idea

Since January, I have been making an effort to review speech/language goals with my students to help them be more aware of why they come to speech, which skills they are working so hard to improve, and that coming to Speech is more than "playing games".

There's also a push in my district this year to have students be a part of tracking their own progress through the use of rubrics and scales. So since we were regularly reviewing their performances anyway, I decided my students deserved to be rewarded for their efforts. Voila - the Speech Records Bulletin Board!

When students achieve a personal best on a certain skill, they get to fill out a speech record ribbon and hang it on the bulletin board.

Now students come into my room asking what their records are, and are so motivated to try and beat their personal best. I love it!

We even recognize "fun" achievements, like the all-time speech room Jenga tower record!

A few records have been shattered this week: one student went from producing vocalic /r/ correctly 60% of the time when reading aloud to 78%! #speechroomwin

Give it a try with your own speech students - and get ready for lots of celebrating :)

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Schoolhouse Talk achieved a personal record yesterday: Ready, Set, Communicate {task cards for Grammar} was featured on the TPT home page!

Bookmarks Craft

getting crafty in the speech room with personalized bookmarks

First of all, I want to thank everyone who supported Schoolhouse Talk during the big Teachers Pay Teachers sale this week. You are all such a blessing to me! I have some goodies up my sleeves to thank you in the next couple weeks. It will be to your benefit to follow my shop so you don't miss out on the surprise! It would also probably be a good idea to follow along on Instagram, or click "get notifications" on Facebook to stay in the know! Just sayin... ;)

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Here's what we've been up to in my speech room this week:

Bookmarks!

We have been busy crafting our little hearts out creating personalized bookmarks to take home! Let me tell you, my students have been loving these. I was observing students in a fifth grade room yesterday and saw a student using her bookmark in her silent reading book :) Students were even asking to make more, and one asked if he could make one for his mom <3

Crafts are a messy business!

I have an abundance of paper scraps leftover from the homemade cards I make, so I brought that in to school along with some paper punches, stickers, washi tape, and every crafter's must-have tool - glue gun!

You could easily do this with construction paper, washable markers, and reward stickers that you probably already have in your speech room anyway.

These bookmarks have been a good activity for following directions, encouraging creativity, and practicing carryover of articulation phonemes. I have one student who is working on carryover of those pesky 'r' sounds, and this activity naturally lends itself to lots of practice! All of these words came up over and over while we were working: bookmark, paper, scissor, marker, sticker, star, heart, stripes, ribbon, letter, glitter, reading ...and more! We even wrote some of her trickiest /r/ words on the back of her bookmark.

I love how each one is unique and reflects the personality of the student who created it! Give this activity a try in your speech room.

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Which skills would you target by using this activity?

Easter Egg Matchups

I found these cute foam Easter eggs at the Target Dollar Spot a few weeks ago (8-pack for $1), and I have been (impatiently) waiting for April to roll around so I could debut my activity idea!

The foam eggs were pre-cut into halves, which naturally led to some matching activities. I used some clear packing tape to make pockets on each half of the eggs. Cut one piece about an inch longer than the second piece, then match them up sticky sides together. The longer piece will overlap the shorter piece and will be used to attach the "pockets" to the eggs.

Here's how we used these in therapy:

This student was working on final consonant deletion. So we matched up words that have the same phoneme at the end, then practiced making sentences with those words.

matching up opposite pairs

For my articulation students, we played a matching game with our phoneme pictures.

Some students matched up community helpers with their related objects or tools.

And others matched up rhyming words. We practiced making lots of sentences with our targets throughout the day.

This was a fun activity, and we'll be using up until Easter. Let me know if you try it!

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Abby's Mom made her a bunny birthday cake when she was younger because her birthday is around the same time. :)

Leprechaun Mask Adapted Craftivity

 instructions for creating and adapting Leprechaun masks in the speech room

Last week it was Cat in the Hat Masks, and this week we've moved on to Leprechaun Masks! We've had a blast with these :) Read on to learn how to make your own in six easy steps.

You will need:

*paper plates (precut the centers out of your plates)

*yellow construction paper (precut into 2" x 2" squares)

*black construction paper (precut into 1 1/2" x 9" strips)

*orange markers, crayons, or paint

*green construction paper (9" x 12")

*glue stick

*scissors

*tape

Step 1: Have your students color the entire plate ring orange. I had them color on the back of the plate.

Step 2: Fold your green construction paper in half. Cut the paper into an L shape over the fold. Note: it's very important to pay attention to how you are cutting your L. Make sure you're cutting off the edges, NOT the fold (see below)!

Step 3: Glue the black strip onto the hat. Instead of cutting the black strip to fit each hat, I just had my students fold over the extra and glue it down onto the back.


Step 4: Cut out the middle of the gold square. An easy way to do this is to fold the paper into fourths, then cut out the corner halfway down each folded side:

Then glue the buckle over the black strip:

Step 5: Attach the hat to the paper plate beard. I think the easiest way to do this was with good ol' scotch tape.

Step 6: Cut strips every half inch or so along the edge of the paper plate to make it look like a beard. Voila! You are finished!

I made some visuals to go along with this craftivity. Some of my students benefit from using picture symbols to make requests and expand their utterance length. This download has picture symbols, sentence strip, and sequencing activities. You can download it for free here.

This was a great activity for all my students. My little ones worked on increasing their length of utterance by making requests and adding in descriptive words (colors). Others were perfecting sequencing and following direction skills. My articulation students wrote words with their target sounds on the hats. I just adore how they turned out!

Don't forget to download your visuals for these marvelous masks here. Please leave a comment or follow my Teachers Pay Teachers store if you download the freebie. Thanks! May the luck o' the Irish be with you!

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Abby would pay off all her student loans if she found the leprechaun's pot o' gold.