Johnny Appleseed Week

Next Thursday is Johnny Appleseed's Birthday so of course, I have exploited it and created a week of therapy lessons based on his story.  This was one of the theme weeks I did last year with my kids and they liked it, but I have added a few new things for this year I think they will love!

The two books I presented last year were borrowed from a teacher who retired so I don't have them anymore, which means I cannot tell you about them.  One of the books was about Johnny Appleseed's life and I did that one with my older language kids.  The other book was about an apple tree and the different things you do with it through each season.  I presented that book to my younger students and we worked on sequencing and retell. 

This year we will be doing Amelia Bedelia's First Apple Pie by Herman Parish!  I am super excited about this because I loved Amelia Bedelia when I was young and I can't wait to introduce her to my kids.  The great thing about Amelia is she is a very concrete little girl.  She does not understand figurative language or multiple meaning words.  This is great for the SLPs of the world because we are provided with a fun way to target those skills. 

I created a speech-language activity pack to work on some other skills throughout the week.  You can pick it up at my TPT store!!

Compare and Contrast:

Have students draw cards to compare and contrast listed items.  They can earn "apples" to put in their pot but watch out for Johnny because he will eat all of the apples out of the pot.  The person with the most apples at the end of the game wins!

Figurative Language:
I made a figurative language card deck as well to work on idioms, similes, and metaphors.

WH Questions:
There is also a WH question card deck to work on who, what, when, where, and why questions.

Articulation Apple Memory:
I thought it might be nice to play Memory with my artic kids, so I made a game where all of the words are on the same cards.  This way all of my kids can play the same game at the same time but work on their own target sounds.  Of course, there was not enough room for pictures on the same card so I don't know how successful this will be.  Hopefully it works.

Expanding Expression Tool:
I LOVE EET!!! I think it is fantastic for describing, defining, and personal narrative.  The pom poms in my room represent EET so I made a worksheet to define/describe apple using this wonderful tool.

Apples to Apples:
This game is great to work on descriptive words for language kids, connected speech for artic/voice/fluency kids, and turn taking/good sportsmanship for social skills kids.  Apples to Apples Jr. is good but I like Apples to Apples Disney better because the cards have pictures on them. It is helpful for our younger kids or poor readers.

Apple Pizza:
We are also going to make apple pizza with Pampered Chef's recipe to work on following directions skills.  For my higher level groups and social skills groups I am going to add a twist to the normal cooking activity.  The first day of the week I am going to introduce the activity after reading Amelia Bedelia and ask what things we need in order to make the pizza.  I am going to make a list of things for each group and only provide those things to the kids when they make the pizza on their second day of speech.  I think this will be a good lesson in problem solving for my kids.  I send home a food permission slip at the beginning of each year for parents to sign and to gather any information on possible food allergies, so I recommend doing that before any activity involving food.

I hope you enjoy!!!

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!!!

The Polar Express

One of my favorite children's authors is Chris Van Allsburg; not only for his story telling, but for his beautiful illustrations.  I was introduced to him in 1988 when my aunt and uncle sent me The Polar Express for Christmas.  I loved that book when I was little and read it every holiday season.  At this point in my career, I have yet to do a Christmas unit, but I am doing two weeks devoted to all of the winter holidays this year so I thought it would be ok to stick this book into the mix.

Here are some activities you can do with this book:

Story Retell:
This is a great story for retell because the pictures are descriptive.  Your students can use the pictures to help them complete a story map and retell with transition words, or you can take pictures of the book and have your students sequence them before retelling the story.

Expansion Questions:
Either while I am reading a story or afterwards, I like to ask questions to stimulate deeper thinking.  Here is a list of questions I plan on asking:
1. Why was the boy listening for Santa's sleigh?
2. Why are the only passengers on the Polar Express children?
3. The boy could ask Santa for anything in the world, why did he ask for a simple bell?
4. Why can the boy and his sister hear the bell while their parents could not?
5. Why can the boy still hear the bell as an adult, while his sister and friends cannot?
6. What does the bell represent?

Compare and Contrast:
A great way to work on compare and contrasting whole stories is to compare a book to the movie made about that book.  I am an avid reader and I love a good movie.  One of my biggest pet peeves is when Hollywood destroys a good book by changing the story.  The book was popular for a reason and should be treated as such...sorry, got a little carried away.  Ok, back to the point.  Some movie trailers are a pretty good picture of what the movie is going to be about, and can be used to compare and contrast the movie with the book it is made about.  One such case is The Polar Express.  Have your kids watch the movie trailer and then use that to make comparisons with the book.  Here is the trailer in case you can't get on YouTube. 

Figurative Language:
Chris Van Allsburg uses figurative language to describe several different parts of his story.  Some of which, he also adds to the illustration.  This a great time to work on figurative language because you have the illustrations to help you explain it.  Some specific things you can discuss are:

Picture2: "Wrapped in an apron of steam"
Picture 3: "nougat centers as white a snow"
               "hot cocoa as thick and rich as melted chocolate bars"
Picture 5: "mountains so high it seemed as if we would scrape the moon"
               "rolling over peaks and through valleys like a car on a roller coaster"
Picture 6: "they looked like the lights of a strange ocean liner sailing on a frozen sea"

Hot Chocolate:
A great way to end this unit is to make hot chocolate like the kind they had in the story to work on following directions skills.  I found a microwave hot chocolate recipe that will let us make hot chocolate from scratch. (or at least without the mix).  This year, I decided to send home permission slips at the beginning of the year to cover all food activities.  That way we could make things whenever we wanted.

Get your Microwave Hot Chocolate recipe here!!