Wow Us Wednesday ~ Lesson Plan Link Party!

We have a brilliant idea if we do say so ourselves....

Well, it will only be brilliant if YOU join in! There are so may smart therapists and teachers out there that work so hard to create purposeful and engaging lesson plans for students. I know I am guilty of re-inventing the wheel too many times instead of reaching out to ask for and share ideas with my fellow teachers.

So, let's change that!

On the first Wednesday of each month, we will open up our Wow Us Wednesday Lesson Plan Link Party. We will keep the links open from Wednesday-Tuesday, so check back several times over the course of the week to catch all the great ideas. Feel free to link up any great lesson plans that you would like to share and make sure to "like" the ideas that you really enjoy. We will feature the top three "liked" lessons in a follow-up post.

What's a link party you say? It is a great way to be linked up to other blogs and share information in one easy stop. But Kelley & Orlanda, what if I want to share and I don't have a blog? Never fear ~ the Dynamic Duo is here! There is a way you can share your idea. Just follow the instructions here.

I'll start the party off with a lesson plan that I find to be incredibly useful with my 5th grade social groups. I think it would be a fantastic lesson to use with middle and high school as well.


One of my tried-and-true activities that I do yearly with my 5th grade social group students is designing our own vision boards. A vision board is a tool that helps students identify what they want various aspects of their life to "look like" in the future.


If we already have rapport established in a group that has been together for a while, then we do this activity at the beginning of the school year. If the group is composed of students who do not know each other well, then we do this activity after we've had time to do some team building.

The first step is to create a web that describes the important components of a balanced life. Here is an example of our web.




The kids then cut out pictures of magazines or find images on the computer to represent their short term and long term goals for each of the areas on the web. This really opens up a lot of discussion and even helps some members find commonalities between each other.

They create their own vision boards and present it to the group. Here are a couple of examples of finished vision boards by 5th graders.



We use these vision boards all year as anchors for discussions about how our social behavioral choices either support or harm our ability to reach our goals.

I hope this activity will be good to add for your beginning of the year planning!   ~Kelley

Here are the friendly guidelines for our get-together:

•  
• When you link up, please grab our button and include it somewhere in your post. You can find it on the sidebar. Or you can simply link to this post on your blog. Thanks!
• Please visit the other great bloggers that link up to check out their ideas and leave some comment love.
• Please consider joining the Dynamic Duo as a blog friend. Follow us by email (on the sidebar) or through your blog reader. That way you can make sure to get the most up-to-date posts.

So, get an awesome lesson plan ready to post and join the party!

Feelings and Emotions ~ Literacy, Language and Social Communication Activities ~by Orlanda

Whew! It's been a while since I have posted, but Kelley and I have been working HARD in our speech and special education classrooms and trying to balance work life and home life! We have spent the last few weeks with a focus on FEELINGS and EMOTIONS with many of our students. We have been using the Emotions Cue Card created by Kelley in all of our sessions to help our students identify their own emotions at the beginning of each social group session. We have found that some of our students have difficulty describing their own emotional state, so we talk about it every week!

Kelley and I work together with a wide variety of students with language, social communication and social behavioral needs and this topic is ongoing for all of these students. In addition, I work with many students with language impairments that have difficulty describing feelings as it relates to others or characters in stories that are read and heard as well as in their own oral and written expression. So, in addition to the groups that we teach together, I have been working on this skill with ALL of my groups. I even managed to incorporate many articulation goals with this lesson, here's how I did it....

We started in our social groups and speech/language groups reading these stories:

 

The Way I Feel was great with ALL of our young age groups (3 year olds-2nd grade students). It was easy to modify the language throughout the story and match emotions pictures. Today I Feel Silly & Other Moods That Make My Day was was great for students Kindergarten through 2nd grade because it had more words and more details in the pictures throughout the story. How Are You Peeling? Foods with Moods was a little too "abstract" for my younger students to recognize the feelings or emotions depicted in the photos, but it was great for my 1st and 2nd grade students. While we read each of these books, we had the Emotions Cue Card handy to match feelings from the book to the photos on the cue card. Additionally, I collected many other Emotions Photos to match feelings and emotions throughout these stories. Several of our students have difficulty understanding and seeing that people depict similar emotions in slightly different ways, so we wanted to offer a variety "faces" for our students to help them see and understand the similarities/differences between faces and feelings. Here is one page of the Emotions Photos that I used for my students to match and describe emotions.

This Emotions Photos document is 4 pages of photos depicting Happy, Sad, Mad/Frustrated, Calm, Scared and Tired. You can grab it here. I turned these photos into cards by cutting the pictures out and laminating them onto large index cards.

While reading all of the Feelings books, we targeted goals such as Answering Basic Questions, Describing details in pictures and using Inference to determine the character's feelings. Each time we read the books, we used the Emotions Photos to match the feelings of the characters. For students in articulation therapy, we continued to use these books and activities and were able to focus on phonemes such as /f, s, sm, sk, l/ to name a few.

After reading each of the stories (over 2-3 sessions), we started making our own book of feelings. With our young kindergarten group, we have several students with low receptive/expressive language skills and poor social communication skills. In this group, we have targeted each emotion in our own book in 1-2 sessions. We started each "emotion exploration" using a computer software program called Faceland.

We LOVE this program because it teaches the students what "clues" to look for on faces to determine the emotion. Each new emotion that is taught is broken into 2-3 facial cues from the eyebrows/forehead, eyes, and mouth. This program also allows the students to see the same emotion depicted in slightly different ways between different people. There are also questions that it asks, and the students have to match the situation to the emotion. For our young students, we often have to act/draw out these questions to help them understand; however, it really helps them learn the feelings. There are even follow up games that go along with each emotion, so it is very engaging!

After going through Faceland, we started making our own book called "My Book of Feelings". Here are some sample pages from this book:

We took pictures of our students depicting the emotion that was stated on each page. This was easiest to do during our Faceland activities for some of our students. Others just needed the Emotions Cue Card or Emotion Photos and a mirror to match their own faces to the feelings. Some students enjoyed taking their picture using the iPad with the camera in "reverse" mode so that they could see themselves making the faces. Still, some of our youngest students (3 year olds) had a hard time making the faces that they were not feeling in the moment, so we improvised by using other pictures or catching them in the act! Needless to say, this was one of the most fun parts of the activity, and all of our students LOVE seeing pictures of themselves in their own books! Here is how one turned out!

Our students with expressive language impairments had some difficulty independently coming up with "things that make me feel ___" so I created a document with pictures for the kids to choose from. A sample of this document is pictured, but you can grab the entire document HERE.



We also found that different students had different feelings about the pictures offered. For example, one of our students feels HAPPY when tying her shoes but another said that this made him feel FRUSTRATED because it was hard for him.

For our youngegst students, we also used the Emotions Photos cards to discuss Similarities and Differences and the "I Feel __ When" cards to Categorize emotions. For our older students in speech/language therapy, we continued expanding this lesson by coming up with synonyms for the feeling words and using them to re-tell or create stories of our own. In their Book of Feelings, we made it harder by having them expand their own stories with their personal experiences.

This has been a great activity for ALL of our students. We have had the opportunity to learn so much about them and they have really improved their ability to describe their feelings and the feelings of others. AND, they will be able to share their books with their families for ongoing conversations at home!

We hope you find these activities useful with the speech, language, and social communication needs of your students! We'd love to know How You Feel about these activities and how we can make them even better!

   ~~Orlanda

Simple Speech ~ "The Gingerbread Man" : Activities to Target Speech, Language and Literacy

Wow! This semester in school is flying by, we only have 7 more days until Winter Break! I feel like I have been drowning in paperwork and evaluations and my student caseload keeps growing! Thankfully, we are in one of my favorite times of year, the Holiday Season!

Because I work with such a diverse population of students and cultural backgrounds, I really have to focus on choosing diverse activities that allow us to celebrate the season in many different ways. My favorite book to read this time of year is "The Gingerbread Man". It's a fun story about something that we all enjoy: COOKIES! This year, I have collected MANY versions of this story to enjoy with my students!

The goals that I target during these activities include the following:
Articulation/phonology: multi-syllable words/phrases; final consonants; phonemes: "dge", /f/, /k/
Receptive language: Recognizing animals, actions, positions
Expressive Language:  Core Vocabulary--"In, Out, Go, Run, He, She, They"; Answer Who, What Doing, Where and Why Questions; Problem solving; Inference; Predicting; Story Grammar; Sequence; Re-telling stories, Compare/Contrast
Pragmatic Language: Feelings/emotions, Non-literal language/Metaphors ("Sly as a Fox")

I started by reading this version: "The Gingerbread Man". In this version, the fox tricks the gingerbread man by telling him, "Come closer, I can't hear you". The kids love this one because we all YELL together like the gingerbread man, "I have run away from . . . .!" and then we list all of the characters.

Then I read this version of the book:

I talked to the students about "folk tales" and why there are different versions of this story. The second version of the story has more details about the process for making gingerbread and has new vocabulary like "sugary glaze". This version also has different characters from the first version of the story.

While reading each story, we focused on the articulation and phonology goals using the repetitive text "Run, Run as fast as you can, you can't catch me, I'm the gingerbread man!" Then, after reading each story (usually during the second session), we retold the story using this visual that I created: Retell the Story. This is a great tool that we used to identify the Story Parts and practice Sequence skills. This is also helpful for identifying details and events from the a story.

After retelling each version of the story. We were worked on compare/contrast of the stories. I use a simple Venn diagram to compare/contrast the stories. I found a new idea on how to do this on Pinterest using paper plates. What a great idea! Here is the link to the post: Paper Plate Venn Diagrams

The kids have been so engaged that I sought out many more versions of this story and have them laid out. They ask every day which book we will read next! So, we also read these stories and completed the same kinds of activities. Here they are:

The kids have done such a great job and have been really engaged in pointing out similarities and differences while we have read the books. I have been using these activities with Pre-K through 2nd grade students. I even used the first version of this story in my youngest pre-school group. I found lots of Gingerbread Man activities on various websites, here are some of my favorites!

Sequence pictures and a mini book:

Gingerbread Man Sequence Pictures

Gingerbread Man sequencing

Gingerbread Man themed games and websites:

 Roll a Gingerbread Man

Gingerbread Man Websites

YouTube Links for Gingerbread Man story and How to Make Gingerbread cookies:

The Gingerbread Man (video)

Gingerbread Men Recipe Demonstration

I really like the video "Gingerbread Men Recipe Demonstration". It's kind of long, so I fast-forwarded many parts, but it was great for my students to see the process for making gingerbread cookies. Many of them thought that decorating and eating were the only steps! The last activity that I did with the kids was to make cookies with them. I had them list the steps for making the cookies and I purchased some Gingerbread Cookie Mix. We did this hands on activity to complete the recipe, bake the cookies, decorate, and EAT (everyone's favorite).

If you have students with diet restrictions or have limitations in making real cookies, we also had lots of fun using the Cookie Doodle app on the iPad. Using this app, you and your students can walk through the steps of mixing the ingredients, baking, and decorating. It's fun, too!

I hope you have fun using some of these Simple Speech "holiday themed" activities with your students! What are your favorite books or activities to use during the holiday season?

~Orlanda

Easy Lessons to Target Play Skills & Sharing

Orlanda and I have spent a considerable amount of time over the past 6 weeks in our collaborative speech/social thinking groups working with our "littles" on basic play skills and sharing. We have two small groups (4 kids each) that we needed to target these skills. One group is made up solely of Kinder students who have significant speech and language delays (both articulation and pragmatic language) and ADHD. The second group is made up of Kinder and 1st grade students who all have pragmatic language deficits, but are "higher" than the first group. The students in this group have Autism Spectrum Disorder and Speech Impairment.

We grouped the lessons in this unit into indoor play skills and outdoor play skills.
During the outdoor play lessons we listed different activities that the kids like to play outside and which were solitary activities vs activities they do with others. After choosing a few of the most common activities on the lists, we taught the explicit rules and defined the "hidden rules" for those activities. We read portions of The Social Skills Picture Book by Jed Baker, PhD that related to outdoor play.

We then took the kids outside to the Kinder playground when no other students were outside to practice taking turns with the balls and playing a simple game that required joint attention. The kids did a great job.

Next, we began to target indoor play skills. We specifically wanted to make sure to address the kinds of activities the kids engage in Kindergarten and 1st grade "centers". We again made lists of activities they did indoors and divided them into solitary vs activities done with others. We read applicable parts from The Social Skills Picture Book again and discussed "hidden rules" for playing with others during centers. We spent several sessions watching and discussing the lessons on sharing and taking turns from Playtime with Zeebu. The kids loved Zeebu and it provides a great anchor to remind students to share in the inclusion setting.

We spent a session reading a picture book on sharing. For the Kinder students with less language sophistication, we read Will Sheila Share? by Elivia Savadier. For the combo Kinder/1st grade group, we read I Am Extremely Absolutely Boiling by Lauren Child.

Finally, we spent several sessions practicing sharing and indoor play. During the first session, we used wooden trains and train tracks (which worked really well since there is an example of sharing/not sharing with trains in the Zeebu video). During the second session we used Legos. Before the first session we spent time teaching various phrases that could be used to initiate play and to help facilitate sharing using this visual.

When we played with train tracks I initially "controlled" access to the tracks handing out one or two to each child and then prompting them to use the scripts to ask for more from me or from a peer. When we did the Lego activity, Orlanda gave each child a small pile of Legos that they eagerly started building with individually. Sure enough, they soon wanted more. They were prompted to ask a friend for a piece. Ya gotta love a little sabotage! :) We do have a few students who we wanted to target accepting "no thanks" from their peer for an answer while we also had one particular student who tends to get run over by his peers and we wanted to help him know it was ok to say "no thanks" at times. This led to some interesting interactions!

I have worked on generalizing the skills from small group to the inclusion classroom by using this powerpoint social story. I just load it on one of the classroom computers in the specific classrooms and prompt the kids to read it (either independently or with me) before center time. Feel free to download it for your use!

Click here to download the "Playing with a Partner" Social Story

I hope that you will find the lesson ideas and tools to be useful with your students.  ~ Kelley

Welcome to the Vocabulary Parade!

I'll admit I've been in a bit of a funk this past month -- too many obligations, too little time. I know that is a universal feeling out there among educators at one point or another in the year.

Yesterday, however, we had a great activity at school that pumped my enthusiasm back up and I'm already brainstorming ideas about how to incorporate instruction in idioms and vocabulary next year with my students. Instead of the usual Halloween based events, our school hosted our first annual Vocabulary Parade. This idea was based on the book Miss Alaineus: A Vocabulary Disaster by Debra Frasier. Our students were asked to choose a vocabulary word and create a costume that would define that word. We then all gathered in front of the school and were led by the high school drum line in a parade. It was absolutely adorable!

I just thought I would share the costumes Orlanda and I came up with. Orlanda's word was "communicate" (of course!) and mind was "deduce" (a la You are a Social Detective by Michelle Garcia Winner & Pamela Crooke). Next year I'm on the hunt for a yellow trench coat!  ~ Kelley

"Halloween" Themed Books AND Core Vocabulary!

 

Halloween is one of my favorite holidays and it lends itself to so many great activities for speech and language learning and functional communication use. I have been working with several teachers (including my parnter, Kelley) to spread CORE vocabulary into many classrooms, and this week I have found a few books to help me combine these two FUN concepts.

 

The first story I used came from an OLD book, "Storytime: Holiday Fun" by Pati King-DeBaun (1993). The story I pulled from this book is called "Stirring the Brew". I have had this tool in my "toolbox" since my first year as an SLP (I actually found a note attached from my CF supervisor!--Thanks, Penny!) Unfortunately this book is now out of print, so I couldn't find it to share. I DID find a photo of it online though! Here it is:

 

 

 

The concept of this story is simple and REPETITIVE. Each page turn shows a witch stirring the brew and then adding various items such as cats, ghosts, bats, spider webs, pumpkins and goblins. This would be a fairly easy concept to make on your own. I LOVED this book for TWO reasons. . . 1)It is repetitive and by the 2nd page, even my kiddos with limited verbal skills were singing the carrier phrase "stirring and stirring the brew, P. U!" and 2) There were many opportunities to use the CORE word "in". While I read this story to my students, I also had a "cauldron" that I found on sale at Target (I found it near the traditional "pumpkin" buckets). I had pictures of each item from the story and a spoon for each student. I also had large picture symbols of the core word that I was working on with the students "in" and later we added "out".

I also found a pre-made board from Boardmakershare.com that depicts some images to pair with this story. Visit the link HERE .

 

Another book I used last week to incorporate CORE vocabulary was the story "Big Pumpkin" by Erica Silverman. Fortunately I was able to find MANY activities online to go with this book.

For this story, we focused on the CORE words "ON" and "OFF". I started by practicing ON and OFF using small objects and large blocks. I also made large picture cards to depict the "symbol" to associate with each word.

I love this story because it is repetitive with carrier phrases and adds a new character to each page. My kids especially loved when I would "change" my voice while reading each page. This story also leant itself to many great questions and vocabulary words, and of course, story elements. For my youngest students, I used picture symbols to help them focus on the the concept "ON". Our carrier phrase was "the (witch) pulled, the pumpkin stayed ON". I also found these awesome links with visuals to add to the story activities!

• Vocabulary cards HERE
• Literacy activities, coloring sheets, sequence cards, & craft activities HERE
• Poem, Story Re-tell, and Book report HERE
• Boardmaker Story board and picture symbols HERE

The last story that I have used this month to work on CORE vocabulary is "The Little Old Lady Who Wasn't Afraid of Anything" by Linda Williams.

I love this story for MANY reasons in addition to the CORE vocabulary that is targeted. The carrier phrase that I focused on with core words was "SHE said, I am not afraid of YOU". The anticipation in this book made it very exciting to read and re-tell many times! I created this visual to teach the core words "YOU", "I", "SHE" and "HE", all of which can be used with this book and it's repetitive text.

I also found many other amazing online activities to pair with this story!

• Literacy, Art, and Circle Time activities HERE
• Story board and picture symbols HERE
• Boardmaker Communication Board HERE

  

This school year, I have added many new students to my caseload and many new students with limited verbal skills and/or poor general intelligibility of speech. My "knee-jerk" response was to GO CORE with more students. If you have not yet gone "CORE", I encourage you to research this topic and you will see some pretty amazing results.

Thank you Gail Van Tatenhove for your amazing work in this area!

~Orlanda

My Favorite Lesson Planner

I've never been able to use a lesson plan book because there are not enough compartments in the day. I teach anywhere from 6-10 lessons a day depending on the schedule. I've tried various ways of lesson planning in the past, but I finally found a system last year that worked well for me. I created a template from a simple Word document so I can add or delete columns each semester as needed.

This year I had to add a second page. I now have one page with academic lessons...

and one for Social Thinking Groups...

I hole punch the pages each week and hang them with notebook rings on the front of an open file box.

The box contains info that I need at my fingertips. I like this system because it keeps the lesson plans within sight. Since Orlanda and I co-teach social groups, she can also view the lesson plans if I am held up with a student issue.

If you'd like to use this template, feel free to download it here.

I'd love to hear about how you write your lesson plans. Please share your ideas in the comments!

Please join as a follower if you haven't already! 
~Kelley

Tips for Organizing Small Classroom Spaces ~ Part Two!

This year I moved out of my spacious, mansion-like classroom....

                  Which looked a little like this...

Ok... maybe not, but in my fond memories I had unlimited storage and didn't have to store things in stacks like the leaning tower of Pisa. 

With our school growing quickly and bursting at the seams I knew it was only a matter of time until I needed to move out of the big classroom and find a "cozier" space that would work. I offered to move into the OT/PT combo room that was currently used as a PTA workroom. 

I spent a lot of time this summer purging and organizing materials and hauling a few storage shelves and cabinets up to school. Thankfully, there is a small alcove outside my room where I was able to fit the shelves and cover them with curtains to mask the materials. 

The classroom itself has an interesting layout. The "bigger" side is about 10x12 feet and adjoins a smaller space with a glass wall. I decided to make the bigger side the academic side and create a Sensory Center in the smaller side.

Because the space is so small, I wanted to be very careful to keep the distraction level low by limiting the amount of "visual noise". I deliberately left as much off the walls in the academic side as I could -- only keeping up the alphabet strip, number strips, expectations poster, the size of the problem visual, and the posters that define expected/unexpected behavior.

Here's what it looks like as you enter the room...

I created the layout by considering "zones". As you enter the room, I created a new behavior reinforcement system on the side of the file cabinet. I love racing, so I decided we would race to the treasure box. The kids cut out and colored race cars, I laminated them, and placed an adhesive magnet on the back.

In the academic portion, I have a small table with the fridge and microwave on top. Under the blue skirt I have hidden the Playmobil School set. We use the school for role plays and problem solving. My desk is to the right with a curtain over my bookshelf to decrease distractions. I strive this year to keep the piles under control on my desk. I can't say I'm being very successful so far!

I didn't take a picture of the school set under the curtain, but if you ever get a donation of money this is so worth purchasing! I totally lucked into getting it.

Because I didn't want to have the walls get too "busy" and because I teach so many different grade levels, I decided not to put up a word wall or other large anchor charts. Instead, I use a wooden paper towel holder on the table and put all the anchor charts in sheet protectors. It allows me to immediately display what we need to view for a lesson without the visual noise. I found the idea on Pinterest - of course! We have also created personal word walls that are stored in folders. This way I can customize for different grade levels and the kids tend to use them more effectively by having them right in front of their view without having to track from their seat to the wall.

The sink area is the only built in area in the classroom. I use the cabinet door to display the size of the problem visual. I added the short curtain on the door because the kids tend to be distracted by the traffic in the hallway. It is still low enough that adults can look in the room.

You can see the glass wall along the computer side of the room. I added white sheer curtains to decrease distractions while still allowing the light in from the one small window.

You can see the white panel curtain that divides the two spaces on the right. I hung a donated curtain panel on a shower curtain rod and created a tie back with ribbon and notebook rings which can be hung on a 3M removable hook. 

I keep the curtain closed to indicate when the area is "closed" or when I have groups with especially distractable students.

Here is the view from the doorway into the Sensory Center.

Yes, the fabric on my homemade Superflex bulletin board is sagging. I need to make time to haul out the tall ladder and fix it. There were no bulletin boards in my rooms, so I created this one from lightweight materials from Home Depot. I'll do a post soon on what to use to make your own bulletin boards.  The shelves hold fine motor activities.

Here is the view of the tent and the Learning Zone area...

Here is the side with gross motor equipment. The red stool hides video games that are used as motivators for specific students. The white wire cart contains puppets and stress balls. The hippity hop sits on top of the unit.

Here is a quick view of the bookshelf, tv for video games, peapod, and trampoline. This is the lone window in the space. It looks out on the kinder playground. You can see my favorite element in my space -- my student created Social Detective. Love him!

So many of us teach in small spaces. I hope some of these ideas get you thinking about how to reduce visual noise in your space. ~ Kelley