Guest Blog Post: Building Blocks in Speech

Note: This post originally appeared on the Twin Sisters Speech and Language Therapy blog on May 29th, 2014. Thanks for reading!

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Big props to Shanda and Manda for allowing me to guest post for them today! Those two girls have wonderfully creative ideas, so I am thrilled to add to the mix.

With our hectic school schedules, sometimes we have to provide therapy "on the fly". I was thinking last week about my therapy sessions, and I found myself going back to Lego/Duplo blocks again and again as my go-to "grab and go" therapy item. My current assignment is working with early intervention (birth to 3) as well as preschool-aged children, and these little blocks of joy are perfect for bringing communication opportunities and fun to our time together.

What can I target with Lego/Duplo blocks?

You can target so, so much with building blocks! Here's a sampling of what I've done with them:

*Basic Concepts: talk about the colors of the blocks; the number of "bumps" they have; discuss the attributes of the blocks (long, short, skinny, large, etc.); build different shapes or letters out of the blocks; talk about which blocks they need first, next, and last
 
*Emerging Language Skills: Legos provide the perfect opportunity for students to practice requests: more, block please, my turn, more blue, I'm all done, etc.

*Turn-Taking and Pronouns: Some of my preschoolers have a behavior goal for turn-taking. Building blocks are also perfect practice for this as you work together to build a masterpiece. We also get tons of opportunities to practice pronouns: my turn, your turn, we go at the same time, his turn, you do it, I need help, etc.

*Prepositions: up, down, around, bottom, top, inside, through, first, last - they're all covered here!

*Following Directions: You can instruct your kiddos how to build something with the blocks, or have them practice telling each other directions. Since the building pieces are different colors and shapes, it's perfect for adding describing words to your sentences: "Put the long red piece on top of the short purple piece." You can also download building plans such as this one online. Instead of printing them off, I just display them on my laptop or iPad for students to reference.

*Articulation: I have my articulation students practice their target sounds a designated number of times before they can earn more blocks to use. I've also attached their target pictures to the blocks and had them practice as they build. (By the way, this adhesive is such a time and money saver for temporarily attaching pictures! So much better than Velcro!)

Another favorite Lego activity of mine is the Lego Read & Build kits. These neat little activities come with a book and all the Legos you need for building the characters inside the book.

I have this farm set, but there are also caterpillar, fairy tale, jungle, and vehicles sets that I've seen. They are great for little ones and the pages show them exactly how to assemble each item. These are great for traveling SLPs because they are compact and contain only the specific blocks you need for that book.

Finally, if I don't want to lug around a set of Lego blocks as I travel from site to site, I always can count on the Lego Juniors Create & Cruise app to help me out. It is a wonderful and FREE app that I recommend to all the parents and teachers I work with. Students get to build their own Lego car (great for targeting language goals as they describe the car they want to build!), and then drive it while they earn additional game pieces! This one is a must-have app and it is definitely a favorite of all my students :)

Thanks so much for reading! I hope I've inspired you to "build" some fun into your therapy sessions!

Just a Snowman {product swap}

 a review of Just a Snowman book companion from Let's Talk

Well, that groundhog predicted winter will never, ever, ever end, and he was right! We're in the midst of a blizzard as I type. School let out early Tuesday due to the snow, and a Wednesday snow day is pending today school is cancelled thanks to 6 inches of snow. I did get a couple days this week, thankfully, to use this book companion from Whitney over at Let's Talk with my students, and it is great!

Just a Snowman, by Mercer Mayer, is such a wonderful book for preschoolers during the winter time. It's full of winter vocabulary and activities, adorable Little Critter pictures, and it's not too long in length. Whitney creates super great book companions, and I especially love her Just a Snowman packet for my preschoolers. Here's what we did with her activities:

    

There are two versions of story comprehension questions included in the packet: one version with picture choices, and one without. For my preschoolers, we used the questions with picture choices. These were easy to use as during-story questions (see above), or as recall questions after the story was over. Tip: Write the page number the question cards coordinate with for easy sorting.

There are also picture cards included for detailed story sequencing, which makes it easy to adjust tasks for each student's ability level. For instance, I used just three pictures for one of my kiddos so she could unscramble and identify beginning, middle, and ending events:

    

A sorting activity targets winter clothes and summer clothes:

I did end up drawing a sun and a snowflake onto the sorting mats to help my littles out remembering the difference between summer and winter. Tip: attach to a file folder and laminate for easy storage/use. The clothing items were also great for targeting vocabulary. There was a regional vocabulary difference in the label for the hat (the picture is labeled 'toboggan', but here in Iowa we know it as a 'stocking hat'), but my students never knew since they can't read. We used them while reading the story to identify the clothing Little Critter and his sister were putting on to go play outside:

Additional sequencing activities include Building a Snowman and Making Hot Chocolate:

 we also used these during story reading

I love barrier games, and this one has amazingly fun pictures to go with it!

For my articulation students we used the Snowy Speech sheets after reading and identified words from the story with target phonemes:

The packet also includes awesome story maps, vocabulary sheets, and writing prompts! Since my caseload is of the preschool variety, I used the writing prompts as conversation starters, then wrote their answers for them, then had them draw pictures of what their answers would be. It was fun!

Additional activities include winter coloring pages, a snowball fight board game, compare/contrast pages, and What's Different cards:

I chose not to print these differences cards out, and instead we used these pages on the iPad. I am going to attach the snowball fight board game to the back of the clothing sort file folder to keep everything in one spot.

Overall, I highly recommend this book companion! It has adorable graphics, a wide variety of activities, and it's very detailed and well made. Get your own copy here. Let's Talk has a ton of other great book packets to check out. She's super thorough with her activities, and creates them specifically to coordinate with Story Grammar Marker. Be sure to browse through all her activities on Teachers Pay Teachers.

You can also find and follow Let's Talk around the web:

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{teachers pay teachers}

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(P.S. I found this video online of Mercer Mayer reading his Just a Snowman book!)

http://www.littlecritter.com/mmreadssnowman1.html

Disclosure: Whitney was so kind to provide me with a copy of this book companion for review. All opinions are my own!

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Abby prefers a hazelnut latte over hot chocolate after playing in the snow.

Blogiversary Guest Post: Carrie's Speech Corner

Welcome to Day 3 of the Blogiversary Celebration! Today's post is from Carrie's Speech Corner. I have enjoyed connecting with Carrie via the blogosphere, twitter, and instagram. She has really fun and wonderful ideas on her blog, and her products are amazing! Make sure you follow her. Carrie has generously shared a book companion with us today, and it includes a {FREE} download! Thanks so much Carrie!

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Disclaimer:  This post contains affiliate links to Amazon.com for your convenience.

Hi Everyone!

First of all, I would like to wish Abby a happy 1st Blogiversary! I love reading Abby's blog and checking out her ideas, so when she asked me to share a guest post with you today, I was happy (and honored) to do so!  If you're familiar with my blog, you may know that I do a "Book of the Week" (more or less) feature.  I wanted to share one of my favorite books for the little ones, plus some activities to accompany the book.

Dear Zoo by Rod Campbell is a lift-the flap board book, making it perfect for little hands!  The story begins with a child who writes a letter to the zoo to ask for a pet.  The zoo obliges and sends the boy 8 different animals, 7 of which he sends back with good reason!  The language of the book is repetitive and predictable ("They sent me a (animal)...He was too ____! I sent him back."), making it perfect for little language learners!  The flaps make it highly entertaining and fun for the little ones as well!

Just to give you an indication of the simplicity of the book, here are a couple of pictures...

Preschool Therapy Ideas:

I spend most of my times working with preschoolers.  Everything about Dear Zoo is perfect for this age group!  One of my favorite things to do with the kids after reading a story like this is play a fun game to reinforce the vocabulary.  Although the vocabulary is not complex, I have many kids who don't know all of these animals! So we might play a game like Memory:

Each child says the name of the animal on the card as they turn them over.  They get to hear the words as other children in the group say them, as well as practice saying the words themselves.

Another thing I like to do with my preschool students is to ask them recall questions regarding the story.  Because they are young, I like to keep things simple and give them visuals.  So, the kids get to see a page like this:

They can respond to my questions verbally or by pointing to the pictures as need be.  Examples of questions include:

• Which animal was too tall?
• Which animal was too jumpy?
• Which animal was perfect?
• Which animal was too big?
• Which animal was too fierce?

You can also use a simple board game (like the one below) to work on any language/articulation skill and reinforce the learned vocabulary at the same time! (Examples:  "I just passed the monkey."  "I'm getting closer to the lion!"  "I landed on the snake!").

Upper Elementary Therapy Ideas:

I may have mentioned that Dear Zoo is great for preschoolers and I think you can easily see why.  However, you can also adapt this book for therapy sessions for upper elementary students as well!  I've mentioned that the book starts out with a child who writes a letter to the zoo to ask for a pet.  What I didn't mention is that we don't get to see the letter.  You can have older students infer the contents of the letter.  I also developed this writing prompt/sheet for students to request their favorite animal from the zoo, great for persuasive writing practice!

Conversely, when the child in the story sends the animals back, he should probably include a note, right?  Students can use pages like these to explain to the zoo why they cannot keep the animal that was sent.

What do you think?  If you like these activities, you can download them HERE. A big Thank You to Abby for letting me share with you today! Happy Blogiversary!!!

Carrie Manchester is an ASHA certified speech and language pathologist and is a Certified Early Intervention Specialist in the state of Massachusetts. She currently provides speech and language services in a public school setting, working primarily at the early childhood level (preschool and kindergarten). Prior to transitioning to the schools, she has spent many years working in early intervention settings and providing trainings to childcare professionals. Carrie is the author of the speech and language blog: Carrie’s Speech Corner. She can also be found on Facebook, Pinterest, and Teachers Pay Teachers.

Guest Post on Home Sweet Speech Room

Carissa from Home Sweet Speech Room is celebrating 1000 'likes' on Facebook, and asked me to write a guest post to help celebrate! You can read my quick overview of evidence-based methods for training social skills and behaviors over on her blog. Enjoy!

Congratulations on your achievement Home Sweet Speech Room!

Blogiversary Guest Post: Communication Station: Speech Therapy, PLLC

To help me celebrate my first blogiversary, I asked a few people who have really supported Schoolhouse Talk to write guest posts this week. Today, Maria from Communication Station: Speech Therapy, PLLC shares her tips for teaching before/after directions. Thank you so much for sharing this great information with us!

I have been using this strategy to teach "before/after" directions to my school age kiddos for almost a decade now.  It's been tried and true for me.  I hope it will be for you too!

Before and after directions can be very confusing for children who have language delays.  Firstly, directions are given very quickly compared to many of our language delayed students' abilities to process the information.  Also the sequencing of these directions are very difficult for some students to really understand. So I came up with these three simple steps I use to teach this skill:

1.  Write out all directions!  This may seem so basic but I have had to explain this to parents and teachers before, so maybe it is not as obvious as SLPs think it is.  Even if my students are NOT great readers, I still provide a visual of each direction.  We cannot dissect a direction if we can't visually manipulate it.

2.  Find the "before/after" clause:   I spend some teach teaching my kiddos how to find the clause that starts with our special words "before/after".  I have my students use highlighters or box/underline these clauses.  I ALWAYS make sure I use a distinct way to ID "before" clauses vs. "after" clauses.  So I may use one highlighter color for "before" and another one for "after", or I underline "before" and I box the "after" clauses.  So for every direction, my student can visually see that before and after directions mean different things.  I teach my students to find the target word and highlight/underline/box the words from the target all the way to the punctuation (comma or period). We practice this over and over until I am certain my kiddos can ID this "before/after" clauses.

3.  Number the clause and act out the direction:  Then I take my kiddos back to these directions and I explain that above every "after" clause we will write the number 1, and above every "before" clause we will write the number 2.  So using our "answer key" we go back and number the clauses.  After that, it's a hop, skip and a jump away from following the directions.  I read the direction, we talk about what we need to do first and second and the child does it.

As my clients get better at following these directions, I will provide less and less cuing until I am able to just verbally give directions.

And that's it!  Those are my 3 simple steps to teaching "before/after" directions.  I hope they work for you too!

Happy Talking!!!

 

 

Maria Del Duca, M.S. CCC-SLP, is a pediatric speech-language pathologist in southern, Arizona.  She owns a private practice, Communication Station: Speech Therapy, PLLC, and has a speech and language blog under the same name.  She also writes a monthly column for the ASHAsphere titled Kid Confidential.  Maria received her master’s degree from Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania.  She has been practicing as an ASHA certified member since 2003 and is an affiliate of Special Interest Group 16, School-Based Issues.  She has experience in various settings such as private practice, hospital and school environments and has practiced speech pathology in NJ, MD, KS and now AZ.  Maria has a passion for early childhood, autism spectrum disorders, rare syndromes, and childhood Apraxia of speech.  For more information, visit her blog or find her on Facebook.

Guest Post on Activity Tailor

Exciting news! Activity Tailor held a contest to help celebrate her two-year blogiversary. She put out a call to people who have been blogging for less than one year, and she ended up choosing one of my posts to appear on her blog!

I am so grateful to Kim for reaching out to us "blogging newbies"! Click here to read my post about a versatile "speech path" that can be used for all sorts of speech and language goals :)