Sunday, December 30, 2012

Groundhog Day Open Ended Games

I got some really cute Groundhog clip art from Little Red's Schoolhouse. I decided to make some simple open-ended games that can be used with any language target.  The first is a card game.  There are groundhog cards numbered one through three...



There are also "Hooray! Spring is coming" cards.  If a student draws this card, they get to take an extra turn.


And "Uh-Oh!" cards.  Groundhog sees his shadow.  If a student draws this card, they lose their turn.



Finally, there is a simple board game.  Help the Groundhog find his way from his hole to Springtime!




This packet can be found at my TPT store.  If you click "Download Preview," you get the board game for FREE!

Hope you like it!


Saturday, December 29, 2012

"How Does David Feel?" Pragmatic Language FREEBIE

While making an articulation activity, I found this image on Graphics Factory:


I noticed that they offered a few other emotion images with a similar look.  I decided to use them to create a pragmatic language activity - "How Does David Feel?"  I named this guy David because he reminded me a little bit of the boy in "No, David!"  by David Shannon.  Ok, the people in the graphics are not all the same, but I kept the name David throughout. 

Here's what you get...There are two pages of emotion/physical state cards (6 cards/page for a total of 12):

page 1

page 2

Then there are three pages of scenarios (4/page for a total of 12):


Use the emotion/physical state cards on pages 2 & 3 to teach the emotions/feelings. Ask your students to brainstorm scenarios that would cause them to experience the emotions.  Once they are able to identify the emotions, you can move on to the second part.  Read the scenarios on pages 4-6. Ask students to identify how the boy (David) would feel in each situation.  There may be more than one correct response per card. Two children may have different reactions to the same situation.  Because of this, you may wish to expand on the activity by asking why David would feel that way.

Hope you like it!  You can download this freebie HERE.  If you do, please leave me a comment and let me know what you think!




Friday, December 28, 2012

Feed the Penguin Companion Packs

So many of you downloaded my "Feed the Penguin: Bilabial Sounds" FREEBIE on TPT!!! (If you missed it, you can download it HERE).

Feed the Penguin: Bilabial Sounds

I read all of your comments on TPT and many of you were interested in other sounds and/or using the activity for other goal targets.  So, I created TWO new activities:

Feed the Penguin:  Articulation Pack



I left in the large penguin if you wish to have your students physically feed the fish to the penguins.  However, if you plan to use this activity with older children, they may not want to play that way.  Because of that, I included these penguin mats:



Print enough copies for each student to get a mat. As they say target words, they can place fish on their mats.  The student with the most fish at the end of the game is the winner.

This activity includes 7 sounds:  /l/ (initial and medial); /k/, /g/, /r/, /s/, /sh/ (initial, medial, and final); and voiceless /th/ (initial and final).  Each sound/position has nine fish with target words/pictures.  (The words are printed on the fish's tail).  Here are some examples:



And the complete word list:



You can find this packet HERE in my TPT store. 

Feed the Penguin:  Language Pack

Now for the Language edition.  In this packet, you also get the large penguin and the penguin mats.  There are four target areas included:

Associations:




Categories:




Verbs:


Activity Includes:  Present Tense, Present Progressive, Regular Past, & Irregular Past

 Antonyms:



You can find this activity HERE in my TPT store.

For those of you who are interested in purchasing BOTH items, I put them together in a bundle, offered at a special value price! Find the bundle HERE.  Also, don't forget about the New Year! New Materials! Sale January 2nd and 3rd. The individual packets will be on sale those days (20% off)!


Happy New Year!



Thursday, December 27, 2012

New Year! New Materials!

Hey everyone!  I hope you're enjoying your holidays/vacations as much as I am!  I had high hopes of working on my January/February planning, new blog posts, and new TPT materials this week, but so far, I haven't done much of anything!  I have enjoyed every moment that I've spent with my family this week though.  

I did want to take a moment and share this upcoming TPT sale with you (organized by Kristin at [simply speech.]).  I have been working on two new products that should be ready in time for this sale.  


Enjoy the rest of your time off!!


Thursday, December 20, 2012

Guest Post: New Years Packet from Home Sweet Speech Room

Today's Guest Post is from Carissa Ten Hoeve.  Carissa graduated in May from Calvin College with her B.A. in Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology and Spanish and is now a graduate student at Saint Louis University. She is passionate about developing new and exciting therapy materials for her students! 

I'm so excited to be a guest blogger today!  I love the SLP community and all of the sharing that happens.  I just started this venture of sharing my materials, so I hope you like them!

A lot of people have been requesting receptive language activities, so I thought I would make one with a theme of New Year's.  This pack is a 31 page download.



The first activity is Decorating: Following Directions. Students will draw streamer cards and complete the task listed on the cards.


If they complete the task correctly, they place the card on their New Year's student mats. Watch for the special cards, where you can lose a turn or get an extra turn!


The second activity is Party Hats: Answering WH-Questions.  In this activity, students will draw cards and answer the WH-question listed.  If answered correctly, the student keeps the card.  


Watch out for special cards, where you must put back all of your cards!


The final activity is Making Predictions. Students will draw cards with a scenario on them and will make a prediction. 

If answered correctly, the student moves forward one space on the game board. 


You can download this freebie HERE.

For more activities and ideas, visit homesweetspeechroom.blogspot.com, my Facebook page, or my TPT store




Thanks for sharing Carissa!  If you are interested in writing a guest post, contact me at cmanchester57@gmail.com.


Wednesday, December 19, 2012

App Review: Go-Togethers by Smarty Ears

The good folks at Smarty Ears have offered me another one of their fabulous apps to review for your today. Go-Togethers targets the ability to identify and describe semantic relationships between objects. Here's the run-down.  When you open the app,  you are taken to this menu screen:


From here, you can notify the developers via email of issues you may be having ("Go-Togethers Support").  You can also view a synopsis of the app by tapping "About Go-Togethers" (see below for screenshot) or view other apps that are offered by Smarty Ears ("More Apps").  Another option in the menu screen is to watch a "Video Tutorial" narrated by the Speech Techie himself, Sean Sweeney.  Although this app is not difficult to use, when an app offers a Video Tutorial, I always recommend that you watch it!


From the Menu screen, you can enter the "Settings Room" (see screenshot below).  This is where you will set up your game play.   There are 4 settings that you can control:  Levels, Activity, Correct Items per Screen, and When Wrong.




Levels:

Go-Togethers offers two levels of vocabulary. As you can imagine, the first is more basic:




And the second is more complex:


You can select as many of the categories as you wish.

Activity:

Here you can chose to target receptive identification of associations, expressive labeling of associations, or a mix of both.  If you chose to target both receptive and expressive, you will begin with a receptive task:


which will be followed immediately by an expressive task with the same stimulus:


Correct Items Per Screen:

You can choose to have one, two, or three correct items per screen:

one correct item/screen
two correct items/screen

three correct items/screen

With each option, there will be only one incorrect item per screen.

When Wrong:

Here you have three options:  Keep Going (there is no reinforcement of the child's response); Remove Item (the incorrect response is removed from the screen); and Buzz (a noise is played to indicate an incorrect response).

Playing the Game: 



From the receptive screen, the student is given a question (e.g., "What goes with ___?").  They are shown a picture of the main stimulus, along with a number of responses (determined by the number of correct responses you chose in settings).  The responses are connected to the stimulus by dotted lines (see above).  To select a response, the student can either tap the stimulus picture and drag their finger to the target response, physically drawing the line (and making the connection) between the two, or simply tap the target response.  Notice that, once you select a correct response, the dotted line changes to a green line:




Once you have selected your response(s), the app does not automatically move along to the next item.  This allows you to discuss the responses with the student(s), brainstorm additional responses not illustrated, and/or discuss the incorrect response.

From the expressive screen, students are simply shown the main stimulus and asked the same question.  There are graphics resembling post-it notes:



You can tap the "I said WHAT" button each time a child comes up with a correct semantic relationship.  As a bonus, you can ask that the child describe why the two items go together.  Tap the "I said WHY" button to tally those responses. Correct responses for "I said WHAT" are listed in the Results Summary, but responses to "I said WHY" are not.  It is explained in the Video Tutorial that WHY responses are not tallied because asking the question is not always appropriate, particularly when targeting "concepts."


Notice the "E-Mail" button on the Results screen above?  You can email a summary report of your session to yourself.  Great for data collection!


So that's Go-Togethers in a nutshell.  Here's what I think:

What I like:
  • The settings.  You can make this app fairly simple or more difficult.  Because of this, you can use it with a variety of age and ability levels.
  • Different response selection methods.  I love the fact that you can visualize drawing a line to connect your response with the stimulus.  However, I have a few kids who have difficulty making swiping movements on the iPad (they tend to move from fingertip to fingernail).  Tapping is an easier input method for these kids.
  • Different options for incorrect responses.  We all have the kids who purposely select an incorrect response so they can hear the buzzer, right?  
  • Data collection!  Need I say more?
  • Manual transition between items.  I love that the app allows you to pause and discuss the items/responses before moving on to the next.  

Things I would change in an update:
  • There isn't an option to add multiple player profiles.  This makes the data collection feature difficult to use in group therapy sessions.
  • Some of the images for responses include the picture of the stimulus.  Because of this, a correct response can be pretty obvious.  For example, the picture of "trunk" contains an elephant:


  • Let's say you select using multiple correct responses (like the "elephant" example above) and the student only gives you one correct response ("trunk" for example).  When you move along to the next item, it will mark the student's one response as correct, but will not mark the two responses the student missed ("peanuts," "circus") as incorrect or omitted.  I would love to see an "omitted" tally in the results summary.
  • When tallying the expressive component, you are not given an option to mark incorrect responses.  When I used the app in a recent therapy session, I had a student give me a response that was blatantly  incorrect, but that was not reflected in the within-app data collection.
The Bottom Line:
  • Smarty Ears has another winner with Go-Togethers! Although there are some minor changes I would like to see, overall this is a great app for targeting semantic relationships.  You could also use this app for a variety of other objectives as well, including categorization, wh-questions, sentence formulation, attributes, etc.  Go-Togethers is also one of the more affordable speech-language specific apps at $9.99 in the App Store.  


Have you used Go-Togethers?  What do you think?
Disclaimer:  Although the kind folks at Smarty Ears were kind enough to offer me a code of Go-Togethers to review, the opinions expressed in this review are mine alone.
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