Showing posts with label product swap. Show all posts
Showing posts with label product swap. Show all posts

April 29, 2015

SLP Trading Post {giveaway}

a product review and giveaway from Small Talk SLP

This week I'm participating in a fun party hosted by Sounds Like Fun! Several SLPs signed up to trade an item from their Teachers Pay Teachers stores, review the product, then host a giveaway. We're calling it a Speech Trading Post!


I was paired up with  Small Talk SLP and she was generous enough to let me preview her Fast Pace Race for S & Z.


What attracted me to this packet was that it's aimed at students who are moving away from drill practice and are working on generalization of their target sounds into conversation.

What's Included:
Three different activities are included to help students practice carryover of their skills:

Warm-Up Tracks: students produce their target sounds as they move down the track. I really enjoyed the variety of tracks that were included in this level. There are multiple warm-up tracks for sounds in the initial, medial, and final positions of words. My students used these in plastic sleeves and marked off their words with dry erase markers. I also have sent these home with students for additional practice!


Qualifying Races: students say a series of words or phrases (multiple levels of difficulty included), racing to beat their previous time while still producing accurate sounds.


Fast Pace Races: students produce carrier phrase sentences, racing to beat their previous time while still producing accurate sounds. These were my favorite cards for my students since many of them are working on their sounds at the sentence level or while reading aloud.


Additional Features:

Game Cards: tell students which race to complete

Pit Stop Cards: can be used by students or SLPs to stop the race and try again.

Flat Tire Cards are presented to students if they produce errors during their races.

Game Cards: a random pick from these cards tells students which race to complete

Prize Cards: trophy and ribbon cards to award students after their races are over


Things to Note:
- I printed about half of these pages in black and white to save on paper. I printed the cover pages for the decks in color, and also the prize cards. The Pit Stop and Flat Tire cards printed well in black and white on colored paper.

- Many of the elements of Fast Pace Race can be used with other phonemes or goal areas. For example, I used the Flat Tire cards with a 5th grade student who was working on her spelling words. If she didn't produce accurate Rs while conversing, the Flat Tire cards served as an excellent visual prompt to correct her sounds.


- Qualifying Race and Fast Pace Race cards were also excellent practice for students who are working on reading and fluency skills.

- I used the Warm-Up Tracks with some language students. They had to make a grammatically correct sentence using whichever word they landed on. Then we worked on expanding their sentences to include more details.

- You can choose to play this game as designed or just pick and choose the elements that will be most helpful to your students. That's the beauty of this packet - it's soooo versatile!


Overall Thoughts:
This was such a creative and original packet! The multiple levels and activities are so very well thought out making this packet useful for students no matter which level of difficulty they are working on. My students were insanely motivated to try and beat their previous race records, and came into my therapy room asking if they could play "that racing game" again! I can't wait for other versions of this set to come out! In fact, I request a rush order on the vocalic R set please!!

Want to win your own Fast Pace Race set? You know you do! Just enter the giveaway below:

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Don't want to wait until Friday to see if you've won? Snatch up your own copy here. And check out the TH version while you're at it.

One more thing!! Small Talk SLP is hosting a review and giveaway of my Fun in the Sun packet. Go check it out!

February 05, 2014

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:
{blog}

(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.