Building Up Skills through the Year
It’s amazing the cumulative effect that occurs when you consistently do something a little bit at a time. When starting out a new school year, use time to your advantage!
How?
Once you’ve scheduled your groups and identified your students’ goals, decide on a “building block” activity that you will work on each session. This activity shouldn’t take much time, but will make a difference over the course of a year. During each session, review the word, idiom, or skill that was introduced during the last session and then move on to the new one.
Examples of “building block” activities:
Vocabulary
Idioms: Introduce one or two new idioms
Word meanings: Introduce a couple of vocabulary words and their meanings
Affixes: Introduce some prefixes, suffixes, or root words (e.g., tri=3, pre=before)
Grammar
Parts of speech: Introduce and practice generating examples of nouns, prepositions, etc.
Fix-ups: Write sentences with errors on the board and have the students fix them and explain their corrections.
Speech
Goals: Have students tell which goal(s) they are working on and describe strategies that help them.
Word of the week: Give students a word or phrase to focus on producing correctly for the week.
For more information about starting off the school year right, check out a post from last year at
http://www.speechtherapyideas.com/2009/08/20/start-out-right/
Add a comment and tell us how you start out your school year or what activities you do consistently to build up skills. We’d love to hear from you!
Becky Wanca
Easy Beginning of the School Year Activity
Here is a great and easy activity to do the first session with your students, especially if you are just getting to know them. The only thing you’ll need is a die and something to write on (e.g., dry erase board, piece of paper) that the students can all see. Write the numbers one through six vertically. Next to each number, write a topic such as: family, sports, school, holiday, hobby/activity, song/musical group, movie/actor, vacation. The students take turns rolling the die and telling something about the topic for the number they rolled. For most of the topics, have them tell about their favorite thing in that category.
This is a great way to get to know things about the students that their files won’t tell you. It also gives you a chance to hear them speak conversationally. If you can, take notes on a card or page for each student that you can refer to later.
Here’s to a great school year!
Becky Wanca
Making it Easier
I love it when I find something that can make my job easier. And I love sharing it with you even more!
I have recently come across a website that makes creating your own materials much faster and easier. You can make customized dice, crossword puzzles, game boards, dominoes, and more in just a few simple steps. Check it out!
http://www.toolsforeducators.com/
(The materials you make are only to be given to your students and cannot be sold or distributed.)
Becky Wanca
Happy Independence Day (Sale)
I hope you are all having a great summer (whether you are working or not)! The beach expansion set was delayed getting posted on the products page, but is now available. It contains 18 pages of printable materials for the beach theme, plus instructions and ideas for their use.
For a very limited time (July 4th through 11th), the new beach expansion set is on sale for $4.00! This is more than 45% off its regular price and the lowest price for an expansion set ever. Take advantage of this sale today and use the materials in your next session!
http://www.speechtherapyideas.com/products/
Becky Wanca
Home Program Basic and Expansion Sets Coming Soon
This month’s basic and expansion sets will include LOTS of printable materials aimed at making home programs easy to put together. There will be calendars, printable cards, game boards, and other pages for a variety of commonly misarticulated sounds, as well as calendars for language activities. The basic set will be sent FREE of charge to those who are active on my email list at the time it is sent.
Also, make sure that we have an email address that will be active over the summer. If our emails bounce too many times, your email address automatically gets unsubscribed. We don’t want to lose contact with you, and you won’t want to miss the ideas and materials that we’ll be sending out this summer! You can sign up a new email address at http://www.SpeechTherapyIdeas.com/free/
Becky Wanca