Mad Hatter Week

In honor of October 6th, National Mad Hatter Day, we did a Mad Hatter Week in my speech classroom.  I sent an email out to all of the teachers at my school asking for hats, and the outpouring of hats has been amazing.  I was super excited to see all of my kids in their fun and funky hats (and my sweet intern decided to participate as well)!!!

Here are all of the activities that we did throughout the week:

Articulation/Voice/Fluency:

I created a Alice in Wonderland War game (like Speech Room New's Angry Birds War) to play with any sort of questions I choose. You can use it when drilling articulation words, working on using voice/fluency strategies when speaking in connected speech, and with random language goals like synonyms/antonyms or categories. 

Get your Alice in Wonderland War here!!

For all of my iPad users, I found an Alice in Wonderland Memory app (Minivelle's Alice in Wonderland Match Game by John Jumper) that looks super cute as a reinforcer for my drill kids.  It is FREE, which I love and there are multiple levels for the memory masters.

Get Minivelle's Alice in Wonderland Match Game here!!

Language/Social Skills:

Prepositions:
Use the Cheshire Cat Preposition cards to play Go Fish (all go fish rules apply) by asking for where the cat or his smile is in relation to the things around it.  If the other person does not have the card, they can say, "The cat disappeared" and the person asking for the card can draw a card.  This works well because they have to know the correct preposition to ask for a card as well as to provide a card.

Get your Cheshire Cat Prepositions here!!

Following Directions:
Have each kid grab a hat from your amazing hat box that the teachers have contributed to and use the hats to follow directions.  There are one step, two step, and three step directions (most using the hats and some sort of preposition) the kids need to follow.  If they draw a Mad Hatter stole your hats card, you take all of their cards away.  The person with the most cards at the end of the game wins!

Get your Following Directions cards here!!

Tea Party Video and Book:
YouTube has the entire Tea Party scene from the 1951 Disney version of Alice in Wonderland.  I used it in two ways:
1) To focus to social skills including expected behaviors, reading facial expressions to determine characters feelings and intentions, and social rules.  I watched the movie in advance so that I knew where to stop and ask questions. 

My school's internet servers are a little weird with YouTube (sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't).  There are several sites on line that tell you how to download videos from YouTube so you can keep the video in a file instead of praying that YouTube will work for that session.  This is the website I went to to learn: Downloading YouTube Videos

Get your Video Questions here!!

2) To introduce the "A Mad Tea-Party" chapter from the book because the story does not have a lot of pictures.  It would be a good way to front load the story so the kids have a way to visualize what is going on while I am reading it.

I bought the book from Amazon for $2.99 and we used my iPad to read it on my Kindle app.  We just read the Mad Hatter Tea Party chapter (after watching the video clip) and used that chapter to work on figurative language, making inferences and using context clues to figure out the meaning of unfamiliar words.  Of course, you can always story map the chapter and retell it to end the activity.

Get your Book Questions here!!

Speech Tea Party:
For my children who are working on social skills, we had an actual speech tea party after we watched the Alice in Wonderland Tea Party video.  We worked on conversational skills in a party scenario including how to initiate, maintain, and switch topic; volume control; when you can eat the food (after everyone has been served); asking for seconds; talking about how you ask for something different if you don't like what was served; etc.  I sent home permission slips before having the tea party to make sure the parents gave permission for the kids to eat and to double check if any of the kids have allergies to any food.

 

Alice in Wonderland iPad Story:
For my younger language kids, I used a FREE app on my iPad called, Alice in Wonderland - An Interactive Children's Story Book.  It told the entire story of Alice in Wonderland as a video.  We then sequenced the video using Boardmaker symbols and retold the story.  I also used the Boardmaker symbols to ask comprehension questions about the story.

Get your Boardmaker symbols here!!

Types of Sentences:

A few of my fourth graders have types of sentences goals, so I thought using the iPad story of Alice in Wonderland to work on types of sentences would be an easy and fun way to target that skill.  The kids watched the story using the "auto play" feature of the app, then I started it again using the "read it myself" feature so they could see the sentences.  We discussed the 4 types of sentences and what punctuation they use, then went through the story and labeled the types of sentences used based on type of punctuation or what they were asking/declaring. 

Categorizing and Comparing/Contrasting Hats:
Have your kids put the hats into different categories.  They need to tell you why the hats fit into each categories based on  the parameters they have set themselves.  Then give them a different amount of categories they need to create have ask them to redefine their parameters.  My kids love doing activities like this because it asks them to think outside the box for connections.  The categories of the hats in the pictures above were: straw hats, hard hats, soft hats, character hats, silly/fancy hats.  After the kids created their own categories, I gave them types of categories (occupations, everyday wear, dress up, etc.) and they had to put hats into those categories.

Another activity you can do with the hats when they are in categories is comparing and contrasting.  Have your students pick two hats from the same category to compare and contrast.  Tell them that the category the hats fit into can be how they are alike, and then they need to discuss what makes them different.  

I had so many Mad Hatter activities, it ended up taking two weeks to get through them all.  My kids loved picking new hats to wear each day and using them in different ways.  I hope you have as much fun as we did.