Thank a Mailman Week!!

First of all, I need to apologize for not posting sooner.  We have been doing all of these great weeks in my speech room, but I just haven't had the time to blog about them.  So now I am going to try to back track and blog about past weeks and you can use them next year when the holidays come up.

We will start with Mailman week...February 4th was Thank a Mailman Day, so in honor of our postal workers, we decided a Mailman week was in order!!!  We created a bunch of fun activities that are related to the mail, letters, or packages for our kids to do.

Following Directions:
My new intern (whom I LOVE by the way...quick shout out to UTD for sending me the BEST interns this year!!!) came up with this activity to put colored tape around boxes (she bought it in the $1 bin at Target) and create following directions/building a tower activity using multiple modifiers.  First we used the boxes to categorize (size, color, fun tape/no tape, etc.), then we had the kids follow the directions to create a tower.  One of my kids was working on left and right, so we also added "left" and "right" cards in our directions for her.  Of course, my kids' favorite part of building the tower, was knocking it down.  

Get your Tower Directions here!!

I used these mailboxes in the following activities.   I found them at the $1 spot at Target but I am sure you can get them other places as well.  Sometimes my kids like to have a place to store their earned cards.  It makes it a little more fun to earn things so that is one way I used my mailboxes...

Figurative Language:  

I have a bunch of kids that work on figurative language because, let's face it, figurative language is hard for our kiddos with language impairments and our kids on the spectrum.  I made this game to work of idioms, similes, and metaphors.  First I talked about what each type of figurative language skill is, and then we went into the fun filled time of earning letters.  

Get your Figurative Language Game here!!

Drawing Inferences:

We used these cards to work on drawing inferences and for the articulation/voice/fluency kids who are working on their strategies in connected/conversational speech.  For my language kids, I read the letters and then we talked about the information that was HERE and the information in our HEAD that we could use to find out what is HIDDEN.  For my conversation kids, they read the cards and then talked it out with each other to come up with the hidden information.  I own this great game, 30 Second Mysteries for Kids, that I took some mysteries from to create my letters.  I can't gift you my letters because that would be stealing from the great people of University Games, but I wanted to at least give you my idea.

Here is a link to 30 Second Mysteries for Kids on Amazon if you want to buy it.

Emotions:

For my kids working on determining emotions from tone of voice, I used the mailboxes to categorize types of feelings.  All of the good feelings were put into the blue mailbox, the not so good feelings were put into the red mailbox, and the silly feelings were put into the pink mailbox.  We started the activity by listening to voices via YouTube with the types of feelings on the table as choices for what voice it was.  After guessing what other people's voices sounded like, we gave a "emotion letter" to each student and had them say a sentence using a voice represented by the emotion we gave them.  The other kids guessed what voice they were using and then they categorized the voices into the mailboxes.  My kids LOVED this activity!! They especially loved using the robot and monster voices.  They even danced like robots while saying things with the robot voice.  It was hilarious!! (Amazing what your kids will think to do)

Get your Emotion Labels with YouTube Clips and Emotions Letters here!!

Big Problem/Little Problem:

I am a HUGE fan of Michelle Garcia Winner.  Pretty much anything she publishes I buy, so the Big Problem/Little Problem lesson is something I do with all of my kids on the spectrum.  Using the Big/Medium/Little Problem visuals from Jill Kuzma's blog, we talked about the levels of problems and some examples of them.  We then gave each student their own mailbox with letters inside it.  Each child pulled out a letter and we read what the problem was.  Then the student had to decide if the problem was big, medium, or little and put the letter under the Jill Kuzma visual.  

To go to Jill Kuzma's site and get her visual click here...

Get your Problem Letters here!!

iPad Reinforcer:

For all of my little ones who love to play on my iPad, I found a cute mail truck reinforcer for $0.99.  The kids got to pick up mail, bring it to the Post Office, separate it based on color, and then bring it to the airplane to send it off to other places.  You can also work on colors if you need to using this app.

Get the Mail Truck App here!!

Speech Mail:

We wrote letters to each of our articulation kids with either a list of words/sentences to say or a stack articulation cards in them.  At the end of the speech session they mailed their letters back to us in the speech mailbox (shown above) made out of a boot box.  It was amazing how the kids responded to their letters.  I work in a Title 1 school and not a lot of my kids have ever received mail, so it was nice for them to get a letter, even if it was only in speech.

A Small Dog's Big Life: Around the World with Owney by Irene Kelly:

This book is super cute and talks about a dog who lives in a Post Office.  It is written in letter and newspaper form to talk about his adventures as he travels around the world with different postal workers.  The book is good to work on vocabulary and to talk about different forms of communication throughout history (e.g., letters, telegrams, etc.).  It is long, so we just picked different parts of the book to read and did not do the entire thing.  

Hope your kids have as much fun with this week as mine did.  The best week is next, MONSTER WEEK!!!