2nd Annual Pirate Week

Last year I started my theme weeks with Pirate Week for National Speak Like a Pirate Day.  Well, that day is today and my kids had so much fun with this week last year that I had to bring it back.  I added a few extra games and activities to change things up and also a few more books.  Please refer to my previous post for the majority of my plans.

Eye Patch!!:
My kids LOVE Headbands and I do too because there are so many things you can work on with that one game: categories, descriptive features, inferencing, articulation, voice, fluency, etc. My current intern had the idea to attach artic cards to an eye patch and make it more pirate related. (Can I also just take a minute and say how thankful I am for my graduate school alma mater, University of Texas at Dallas, for supplying me with the BEST interns!!! I mean, they are really spectacular.  I have been SO BLESSED with the wonderful ladies whom I have had the pleasure to work with these past few years!!! Sorry, that just needed to be said.)  For my artic kids, I used SuperDuper artic cards for the sounds they are working on.  I used the same cards for all of my other kids, it just didn't matter what sounds I used.  After three days of this game being used at all different levels I can tell you it is a success!!!  Good thinking Morgan!!!

Pirate Pictures:
A bunch of my kids with AU are working on determining a person's/character's feelings/motives/intent through nonverbals so I thought I would print off some pirate pictures for them to look at and discuss.  We focused on three main things for each picture:
1. What the characters are looking at
2. What the characters might be thinking
3. How the characters are feeling
When I was looking for good pirate pictures to use online, I discovered that most of the pictures are not quite appropriate for my kids.  I was feeling kind of low about this fact, and then the clouds parted, and the sun shined down on The Pirates! Band of Misfits.  I have never seen this movie, however what I do know about it is that it is a stop motion film where the characters have great facial expressions and big eyes so you can follow their eye gaze.  I found 20 different pictures online, pasted them into a pirate boarder, and voila! my pirate pictures were born.  I do not know the copy write info on taking pictures from movies so I'm not going to post them to my TPT store, but I will post them here.  So, for anyone who asks, these pictures all came from The Pirates! Band of Misfits which is a movie by Columbia Pictures, Sony Pictures Animation, and Aardman Animation.  Hopefully that is enough credit ;)

Get your Pirate Pictures here!!!

Pirate Talk:
My artic kids have been working SO hard over the past year on learning how to say all of their sounds so a bunch of them are now at the conversational level. Last year we played a game created by Jenna Rayburn from Speech Room News called Capture the Jolly Roger to work on conversation. I wanted to add another level to the game by creating some questions/conversation starters to elicit even more connected speech from them. You can use the cards alone or in conjunction with the game Jenna created (see previous post). They are also my first product on my TPT store!!! Don't worry, they are still free, I'm just moving everything over there instead of Google docs from now on.

Get your Pirate Talk cards here!!!

Books:
The last additions to my Pirate Week activities are some new books: Pirate Soup by Erica Farber and J.R. Sansevere and Edward and the Pirates by David McPhail.  Both books are relatively short so you can do other activities with them.  I make picture cues for Pirate Soup to work with my younger kids on sequencing and retell and am using the Story Grammar Marker to retell Edward and the Pirates. 

I hope you can use any or all of these activites.  Don't forget to look back at my previous post for more!!!



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.

Back to School/ Pirate Week

Hey y'all,

We took some time off for the summer and now we are back!!!

I have been all over the place this school year with extra school stuff popping up everywhere so I have not been able to post yet, but that does not mean that I have not been coming up with fun things to do with my kids in the classroom.  This summer I discovered a calendar of crazy (but real) national and international holidays and I thought I would create some theme weeks that would go along with those days.  Sorry, a few of these themes are past the date that you could attach them to if you want to do things by the calendar, so you can just do them as theme units or wait until next year to attach them to the actual dates they are related to.

We will start with Pirate Week which will attach to September 19th (National Speak Like a Pirate Day).

First off, I went to Target and got hats, eye patches, and swords in the party section for the kids to wear throughout the week.  We took pictures just for fun and I thought I would show y'all how great they turned out, but of course, HIPPA says no faces, so I found a cute pirate face cake that I could use to cover up the faces of the pictures.  Now I wish I would have found that cake earlier because it is SUPER CUTE!!!  Here is the link to it if you want to make your kids some cake: Pirate Cake

Ok, now on to the good stuff.  A lot of the activities I gathered from different blogs, websites, and Teacherspayteachers.com but I will give you links to everything so that you have all of the information in one place.  I also lesson planned a few pirate books (because that is my favorite way to do language therapy).   

Articulation/Voice/Fluency:

Jenna over at Speech Room News posted several fun pirate activities and games last year on her blog.  I used her Capture the Jolly Roger game to work on using good speech strategies while reading the fun pirate sayings.  Here is a link to her website so you can see how she set it up.  Capture the Jolly Roger

I tweaked the game just a little to provide more opportunities for talking and you can use them as a vocabulary game too if you wanted to.  Instead of just writing the pirate phrase on the Popsicle stick, I wrote what it means on the back of the stick in a different color.  This way you can work on determining the meaning of the phrases by putting them in sentences, and the kids can find out if they are right by looking at the back of the stick.  I also found cute pirate boxes in the dollar spot at Target this summer and bought two so my kids could keep their team's symbols in the boxes.  Jenna used wooden pieces for her team symbols, but I just used pictures from the internet.  I laminated them and then attached them to colored Popsicle sticks to make two teams.  The blue team had to capture all of the green teams symbols and the green team had to capture the blue team's symbols.  The first team to capture them all, wins!!!

My school gave out iPads to use in the classrooms this year so I finally have an iPad to use in speech!!! (The villagers rejoice!!)  I have been trying to find ways to implement the iPad and remembered a Preschool Pirates post Jenna wrote at Speech Room News.  In the post, she listed several iPad games that are pirate related.  (As well as several pirate activities that looked really cute for younger students)  I downloaded a few of her iPad game ideas, but the one I chose to use was Blackbeard's Chest Memory Game.  I had the kids drill their words and then take a turn when they were done.  The loved it.  It has several levels, so the kids can keep going if they are extremely good memory players.

Go to the Preschool Pirates post for more information or get the iPad game.

Language/Social Skills:

I found a bunch of different activities you could do for language kids based on level or age.  Here are a few ideas and where I found them.

Pirate Themed Preposition Book:
I am always working on prepositions with at least one of my kids.  I found this cute pirate themed preposition book at Teachers Pay Teachers for FREE!!! (Thank you Sped-Ventures) Just print if off, laminate, add Velcro, and you are good to go.

I Have, Who Has:
Another great Teachers Pay Teachers free game is an I Have, Who Has Pirate Synonyms game.  (Thank you Vintage Teacher) It is great for kids who are working on synonyms.  I used folders to cover the bottom words on the cards (the "who has" words) so that the kids did not get too confused on what word they were looking for.

School Treasure Hunt:
 I found a scavenger hunt on-line (and I can't remember where I got it so I can't post it, but there are a bunch on-line for you to pick from) to use with my kids.  I have an intern this semester so we split the kids into two groups and took pictures around school of them with what they found to fulfill the scavenger hunt clues.  This was great because I could focus on descriptive words, categories, pretty much anything that you want to language wise, and social skills.  We talked about how there is not one right answer to the clues and worked on compromising when trying to find what to take pictures of.
Here are a few examples of things on my hunt:
1) Find something that is small and blue
2) Find something you can wear in the summer
3) Find something that is sweet

Blackbeard, Bluebeard, and Redbeard:
I found a short video on youtube that is was perfect for my younger kids instead of reading a book. (If you can't get access to youtube at school, it is on teachertube as well)  It was a story song about three pirates, Blackbeard, Bluebeard, and Redbeard, who wanted to paint their ship.  They could not decide what color to paint it, so they each started painting it the color they wanted.  The ship was never seen again because it was maroon (you know marooned on an island?).  Cute right?  I have a few kids that are working on sequencing using first, next, and last; answering wh?s about a story, and naming things from oral description.  I made some Boardmaker symbols for them to use when sequencing what colors the pirates wanted to paint the boat in order.  I also made symbols to go along with the following comprehension questions:
1)What were the pirates looking for? (treasure)
2)What did the pirates find? (socks)
3)Who wanted to the paint the boat blue, red, black? (Bluebeard, Redbeard, Blackbeard)
4)What color did the boat end up being? (maroon)
5)Where did the boat end up? (an island)
6)What did Bluebeard want to paint blue? (the sails)
7)What did Redbeard want to paint red? (the canons)
8)What did Blackbeard want to paint black? (the ship from top to bottom and front to back)
9)Who has an eye patch? (Redbeard)
10)Who has a hook? (Bluebeard)
11)Who has a peg leg? (Blackbeard)

If you have time, you can also have the older kids watch the video and ask them what marooned means.  They can use their context clues from the video to find out.

Here are the Boardmaker symbols I made for you to use if you want to.

Finally...Book Units:

How I Became a Pirate and Pirates Don't Change Diapers by Melinda Long and David Shannon are two cute books that are great for figurative language and making inferences.  I would read through the books and ask questions along the way.

Here are a list of questions that go with each book:
How I Became a Pirate:
1)How did Jeremy Jacob know it was a pirate ship?  What are other symbols for/associated with pirates?
2)What does slathering mean?
3)What does "shiver me timbers" mean?
4)What did the pirates think about the sandcastle Jeremy Jacob built?
5)What is a sea chantey?
6)Why do pirates sleep with one eye open?
7)How does Jeremy Jacob feel about not getting a bedtime story?
8)What caused Jeremy Jacob to not want to be a pirate forever?
9)What emotions does Jeremy Jacob feel during the storm?
10)Why does Jeremy Jacob think that they won't need the map again?
11)How does Jeremy Jacob feel about his pirate adventure?

Pirates Don't Change Diapers:
1) Who came to visit Jeremy Jacob?
2)How are the pirates mistaken about what baby sitting is?
3)How did they run out of diapers?
4)Hoes does everyone know Bonney Anne is hungry?
5)Why are the pirates all dirty?
6)What kinds of "rock" did each person mean? Jeremy Jacob? The pirates?
7)What does "quicker than you can say 'scurvy dog'" mean?
8) What does marooned mean?
9)What does "we stopped so fast we were almost pirate pancakes" mean?
10)Why does Jeremy Jacob know where to dig?

Compare and Contrast:
You can create a Venn diagram to compare and contrast Jeremy Jacob's life with his pirate life (after reading How I Became a Pirate). There are tons of ways to contrast the ways of life, but it will be difficult to find similarities.  My kids came up with some (they both play soccer, both have adults, and both have digging) to get you started.

You could also compare and contrast the two books since Pirates Don't Change Diapers is the sequel to How I Became a Pirate.

Story Map and Retell:
We used a story map to map out the second book and then transition words to retell the story.  I have a picture of the story map I use on another post if you need an example. 

Pirate's Booty:
The last thing I did with my kids for pirate week was send home permission slips for the kids to have Pirate's Booty.  We talked about how the pirate word for treasure is booty and how the snack looks like gold nuggets. Enjoy!!

Here is a copy of the Permission Slip for you to use.