Balloons Around the World Week

The first Wednesday of October is Balloons Around the World Day.  On that day we celebrate the joy and delight that balloons bring to our lives.  I created a week focusing on balloons going on trips around the world.  I think next year I may create some activities about balloon animals or something like that, but for now, let me show you what we are doing in my speech room for that week.

Around the Globe Articulation:

I created a fun activity to drill articulation words using a globe.  I painted my globe so all you could see were the continents and oceans but a regular globe works just as well.  The students spin the globe and put their finger somewhere on it to stop the movement.  Whatever they land on tells them how many words to say, how many times to say a word, and/or to put the words in a sentence.  The kids think it is fun to see where their fingers end up on the globe and you can get a bunch of repetitions this way.  

Get your Articulation Around the Globe activity here!

Size of the Problem Balloons:

Most of my kids working on pragmatic language/social skills have a hard time determining the size of a problem (to assess how they should respond in terms of behavior) and then deciding how to solve that problem.  Therefore, I created an activity to work on social problem solving.  The kids determine the size of the problem listed on the card and discuss how to solve it to keep their cards.  Sometimes they might draw a card stating their "balloon is losing air" and you take away the number of cards listed.  The person with the most cards at the end of the game wins!

Get you Size of the Problem Balloon cards here!

Balloon Prepositions:

To work on prepositions, I printed off my balloon pictures along with images I found online of different parts of the world and asked the kids to place them in different areas of the pictures.  I can work on prepositions receptively by asking them to place the balloons and expressively by putting the balloons in different areas of the pictures and asking them to tell me where they are.  Sadly, I am not able to give you the balloons as images without putting them into a printable activity and I don't have permission to give out the on-line images, but I wanted you to know about the idea of the activity if you want to make it yourself.

Book Units:

Ben's Dream by Chris Van Allsburg is great because there are several pages without words showing parts of major landmarks around the world.  I found pictures of the actual landmarks and had the kids draw inferences about what landmark he is traveling to and give them a little information about it.  I then check their auditory comprehension by going back and asking questions about the landmarks he visited.

Get Ben's Dream here!!

Up!  by Random House Disney is a good book to work on WH questions, prepositions, and feelings.  My intern created a list of questions to go along with the book that I am adding here for you to use.

Get Up! here!!

Where Do Balloons Go? by Jamie Lee Curtis looks super cute!! I have not lesson planned it since I found it after my week ended.  I will work on this one for next year but I thought I would add it now so you have another book to use.

Get Where Do Balloons Go? here!!

Happy Ballooning!!!

Dr. Seuss Week

Dr. Seuss' birthday was March 2nd and is now a national holiday; therefore, it is defiantly a reason to celebrate with a theme week!!

I don't know if I have expressed how much I love Pinterest recently, but it is AMAZING for planning theme weeks! I found a game called What's in the Cat's Hat that I thought was super cute to use, but being the (I don't want to say "cheapskate" so I'll go with...) spendthrift that I am, I decided to make my own hats and use them for several different activities instead. I took some old plastic Lakeshore Learning tubs (at one time they had manipulatives in them but when I moved into my new classroom I inherited four empty tubs that I kept for a random tub emergency.  Well friends, a tub emergency came up and so now I have two Cat in the Hat hats to use!!!) and added red and white felt strips to create the stripes of the hat.  I then took a piece of hard white felt to create the rim of the hat.

Bean Bag/Hat Reinforcer:
My intern made bean bags out of balloons and flour to use with the hats that I made.  We made a starting line with tape of the floor and had them toss the "bean bags" into the hats as a type of reinforcer for my articulation, voice, and fluency groups.  We even made different distance lines to make the activity harder once the kids accomplished getting the bags in the hats from the first distance.

Prepositions:
The librarian at my school is WONDERFUL and has the best stuff in her office.  She found out I was going to do a Dr. Seuss week and brought down a stuffed Cat in the Hat and Thing 1/Thing 2.  I used them with the hats to work on prepositions: put the Cat in the hat, in front of the hat, between the hats, etc.  We then used the 2 things to work on following multistep directions and directions using temporal concepts (e.g., "Before you put the Cat in front of the hat, put Thing 1 next to the hat").

What's in the Cat's Hat:

I put the cards from SuperDuper's Vocab BINGO into the Hat and then pulled each card out and had the kids guess what was in the Cat's hat based on the description read.  You can do this a few different ways depending on the amount of cuing your children require.  You can give the kids their own BINGO board and only put one card deck into the hat so they will know exactly what words to choose from, you can pick a few cards from each card deck and have the kids guess what you are describing without the visual BINGO board cues, you can put items in the hats for them to guess by your description (or describe themselves), or you can create your own pictures to describe.  (Don't forget, if you do not want to make your own hats and just want to buy the game, you can get it on Amazon here) 

The Cat in the Hat:
I found a YouTube video of Justin Bieber reading The Cat in the Hat with a video of the book behind him on a screen.  Now sadly, I am not a fan of the Biebs but my kids seem to love him so I did this activity for them.  (All Biebs fans, forgive me) I used this video in two ways:

1) Instead of reading the book to my kids, I let Justin Bieber read it and we answered comprehension questions, talked about main idea, and created a summary after the video.

2) The Cat and his friends Thing 1 and Thing 2 do A TON of unexpected things!!! We created mini hats out of red Solo cups and used this video in conjunction with Michelle Garcia Winner's Think Social Lesson 12: Good Thoughts verses Weird Thoughts.  We gave our kids red and blue pieces of paper (red representing weird thoughts and blue representing good thoughts) and they put them in their cups when they noticed a character in the story giving them good or weird thoughts.  In Michelle's lesson the teacher is meant to give the kids the colored paper for their actions, but I find it easier to start with them having good/weird thoughts about another person so they can understand what they are thinking before seeing how their behavior affects me.

Synonyms and Antonyms:
I found some cute I Have, Who Has Synonym and Antonym activities by Carolynn Ruark on Teachers Pay Teachers for FREE and used those with my kids who are working on synonyms and antonyms.  You can go directly to her TPT store here.

Mad Libs:
I LOVE using Mad Libs in speech to work on I ask my articulation kids to try to find words with their sounds in them to complete the Mad Libs and then read it.  It is a great way to work on saying their sounds in connected speech.  I found this Seuss-Inspired Mad Lib on Teachers Pay Teachers for FREE.  You can pick it up at K. Ratliff's TPT store here.

Following Directions:
To work on following directions I created a some following directions cards with Dr. Seuss letters.  I have been focusing on "before" and "after" rules so most of the cards have directions that relate to those rules.  The kids drew a card and completed the direction to earn bean bags.  After they had earned three bean bags, they were able to try to get them in the Cat's hat.

Get your Following Directions Cards here!!

Bartholomew and the Oobleck:
This book is great to work on predicting (size of Oobleck on each page, how it will affect the community, how Bartholomew might be able to stop what is going on, etc.).  To be honest, this book is kind of long so I rewrote it to make it shorter for my time limit.  We then retold it, talked about actions versus consequences, and finished the activity be making our own Oobleck using a recipe I found on Teachers Pay Teachers.  It was really gooey so I would add less water next time but the kids had loads of fun with it. Get the recipe from Gladys Daniels' TPT store here.

Bathtub Party Week

December 5th is National Bathtub Party Day!!  Yep, that's right, an actual day devoted to having a party in a bathtub.  I have absolutely no idea why this day exists, but because I just so happen to have a bathtub in my speech room, I thought I would create a theme week around this random holiday.

I normally only let me kids sit in the bathtub when they buy "Tub Time" during prize week, but I am going to let them take turns sitting in the tub during speech this week due to the theme.  I plan on bringing a short folding table in so the kids in the tub can still participate in the speech activities without getting out of the tub.

I created a few bathtub related activities to do with my speech kids that I thought I would share.

Defining Words:
Using a cloze sentence, the children will define bathtub related vocabulary.  Start by explaining category, function, and what a distinctive feature is before asking them to define words. 

Following Directions:
A bunch of my kids have a hard time with following directions especially ones using "before" and "after", so I whipped up some three and four step directions using those pesky temporal concept words. 

Drawing Inferences:
This skill always needs a little more work, so I created an activity targeting drawing inferences based on "hopefully" real life situations.  Let me know if you like it.

Four Types of Sentences:
For all of those who have fourth graders with goals based on the forth grade TEKS, this is the activity to you.  The kids have to determine if the sentence they draw is a declarative, exclamatory, interrogative, or imperative sentence by placing the rubber duck on the correct bathtub. 

Get the Bathtub Activities here!!

Rubber Duckies:
My sweet intern found these rubber duckies on amazon for $6.  To get them go here. 

The great thing about these particular rubber duckies is they are so colorful and come is sets.  I plan on hiding them around the room and having the kids find the ducks and then using qualitative and prepositional concepts, explain what duck they found and where they found it.  I can hold up one duck and ask the kids to find it's match, can ask them to find another duck of the same color but a different design, you get the picture. 

These ducks can be used to compare and contrast by color, design, the fact that they are all ducks, etc.  You can also use the ducks to work on quantitative concepts by passing them out in different amounts and asking the kids who has more, less, etc.   

We are planning on putting clues on the bottom of the ducks and having a little scavenger hunt as well.  I found pictures of different things related to rooms in my school and took pictures of parts of items in my speech room for the students to use as clues to infer where the next rubber ducky is hiding.  The last clue is part of a candy jar in my room, so each kid will have a reward at the end of the hunt.  Here are the clues I am using on the bottom of ducks.

 

Ok, wish me luck on letting my kids spend a week in a bath tub!!