It's time to add five more FREEBIES to your collection!
Frankie's back with some Valentine treats! We sang our way through Halloween with the #SLPHalloweenHop and jingled our way through the #SLPChristmasHop so it only seemed fair to add some more love to your collection with the #SLPValentineHop.
To collect your collaborative freebies, that's right they work together, search #SLPValentineHop on Teachers Pay Teachers or click on the links below!
Sparklle SLP added story and song visuals for sequencing, smash mats, a game board and sentence flips! Wow!
Speech Wonderland adds Category goodies and blank Valentine's Day cards. Her freebie includes a colorful categories booklet, categories game board, heart category match and blank Valentine's Day cards!
Wait, there's more!! Speech Owl adds phonemic awareness activities that are simply adorable.
The winter break countdown is on. SLPs everywhere are the busiest elves I know, delivering evals and IEPs wherever they go. I don't know about you, but my typing fingers are on overdrive trying to get it all done.
This is where some of my SLP blogging buddies and I step in to help you out with some free speech therapy materials to spread holiday speech therapy cheer through a collaborative freebie hop. Simply download these 7 freebies and you will have one large Christmas themed speech therapy packet to meet many of your students' needs! I love having all of these awesome materials at my fingertips for my mixed groups!
Oh yeah, did I mention that they are literacy based? SLP swoon. Yup, my friend The Pedi Speechie came up with another innovative Frankie story to the tune of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer as the anchor to the therapy activities.
I chime in with WH questions that you can use as is or attach to clothespins for students to attach to answers displayed around the wreath. I love to throw them in a sensory bin along with some plastic frogs.
When you download the WH Questions Freebie, you will also find links to the coordinating freebies from these fab SLPs:
The Pedi Speech starts us off with her Holiday Hop story featuring our favorite frog Frankie
One of my biggest pet peeves is when students do not know why they come to speech therapy. "To play games" just doesn't cut it in my book. Do we ever play games in my room? Absolutely. Not every session, but it does happen. However, that game is a medium to address the specific goals, not the goal itself. Now, I know that you all know that so you're probably thinking I'm preaching to the choir, right? My point is that WE know what the purpose of that game or activity is but do our students?
Having students know what they target in speech-language has always been an important factor for me but a couple years ago I had to take a good hard look at HOW I was doing that. As a token of congratulations for being nominated educator of the year, my sweet SLP colleague compiled a book for me with responses from my students about what they love about coming to speech. The responses truly touched my heart (I may have shed a tear or twenty) but responses that referenced the WHY they came to speech were in the minority. I am a big proponent of self-reflection so I had to take a step back and really think about what I could do to make sure that was in the forefront of their thinking about speech. My challenge? It was important to me to address that in a way that would not sacrifice the strong interpersonal relationships with my students that I hold near and dear to my heart.
Flash forward to the next year... our SLP assignments were changed and I was now tasked to ensure that my self-reflection of increasing goal awareness took place while also establishing authentic relationships with new students. The solution that worked for me was using Speech Therapy Goal Tags. I'll be honest here... they weren't just helpful for my students but for me as well! Not only were my students learning what their speech therapy targets were, but I was learning what their specific targets were. Particularly for my students targeting language skills, this can be a difficult task.
What I didn't anticipate was how much the students would LOVE the tags. I intentionally made the goal tags in landscape orientation so they would be easy to discern from brag tags that we added. To the students, the tags were regarded as an ID badge. I included a schedule badge to encourage students to come down to therapy independently at their scheduled time. I had to hide my giggles when I would spot a student testing out their badge to see if it would gain them access to the elevator like staff badges do.
How did they work?
Students were active participants in assembling their goal badges onto their lanyards. This was a great opportunity to talk about what they were working on in speech in a relevant project based manner that held relevance. The badges then traveled with students back and forth from class. They were also a helpful reminder to teachers about what each student was targeting in student friendly "I can" terms. Students took pride in them and would often ask for special permission to take them home and show their parents (ummm... absolutely!).
I highly recommend trying it out to see how it works for you and your students. You can create your own tags with index cards/cardstock or use the Speech Therapy Goal Tags that I made if you want a print and go option. I added a customizable option as well so you can taylor them to meet your specific needs.
What works for you? I'd love to hear. Shoot me a message or let me know in the comments below!
UPDATE: Do you want to hear more about using Goal Tags? Check them out in the video below!
(Don't mind the awkward screen shot... thanks YouTube!)
I was recently invited to participate in a career fair at my son's elementary school. I was excited to participate and share my passion for speech-language pathology with them! I did not learn what speech-language pathology was until I was in college (gasp!) but am so thankful that I was blessed to be housed in the dorms across from a SLP major. Watching her creatively develop materials for her client in her clinical inspired me to take an introductory course to check out what speech-language pathology was all about. The rest is history!
In speaking with my son, one suggestion that he had was for the presentation to be interactive and engaging. I couldn't agree more so I decided to create an "Escape the Speech Room" activity that would introduce the students to various aspects of communication with missions in Articulation, Language, Fluency, Voice and Pragmatics! The students had a blast and they learned a bunch along the way!
Knowing that the students would likely be listening to various presentations throughout the day, I wanted to give them the opportunity to get up and move while learning in the process.
Escape the Speech Room was broken up into 5 “missions” which were broken up into centers. Each of the 5 Missions reflected on an area within our scope of practice: Articulation, Language, Voice, Fluency, and Pragmatics.
Each mission contained a Debriefing Sheet with information about that particular area. It also included a list of materials that they needed as well as a description of their mission. Eachmission uncovered a key to the help unlock the individual padlocks on the box.Once the groups solved their missions, they came together to learn about some of our work settings and decode the final clue. The individual padlocks all contained a card with a setting an SLP may work in. The students used those cards to collectively determine what the passcode to the final word lock was.
When the students completed their challenge, they filled out a Reflections sheet to show what they learned and share it with the other students. This allowed students to learn about the different centers or areas of speech-language pathology by reading their fellow classmates' reflections.
Does this sound like something that you would be interested in using in YOUR setting? Let me know what you think! {Update: If you missed the copy sent out in my newsletter, don't fret! Per your requests, I included it here in my Teachers Pay Teachers Store. Sign up for my newsletter if you would like to have first dibs and try out some new products for free.}
