Magnetic Poetry Kids!

I'm back on the blog! I've finally gotten over the Hoosiers loss in the NCAA tournament. Ha, just kidding! Life has just been busy and the spring is rolling. Spring break brought a trip to San Francisco and Napa Valley with some college friends, and post-spring break brought the start of the track season (I'm a coach for our 4th through 8th grade team!). And I've been training for a half marathon in my little bit of free time.

I've been working on lots of new projects, but just haven't had time to blog about them. First thing I'm going to share is a cool new magnetic sentence formulation/grammar resource I just bought. My husband and I were shopping in a pretty cool toy store for my niece's birthday, when I came across this:

The kit has tons of magnetic words: nouns, verbs, conjunctions, prepositions, and even morphological endings! I can already think of a million ways to use them, and I think the kids will like them.

The words come in sheets...

that you pull apart... 

There were so many words that I ended up sorting them into piles by parts of speech to make sentence creation a little bit easier.

Nouns, verbs, and prepositions, oh my!

The words will stick to any magnetic surface, including the tin they come in! I spy some nominative and possessive pronouns:

and present and past tense verbs!

And these are pretty cool: 

adding -s for plurals or third person singular verbs, 

-er and -est for comparatives and superlatives, 

-ed for past tense verbs, 

-ly for adverbs, 

aux. verb +ing structures, 

etc. etc. etc.

Let the sentence formulation begin! 

Yep, that's what I did! With my husband, too, but there's no word for that. Ha. Our half marathon is next week, so the training continues!

And I've got them all ziplocked and labeled to use with my kiddos.

Packed up and ready to go to school!

It's for sale on Amazon, too. You can check it out here: Magnetic Poetry Kid

This week kicks off the last round of state standardized testing for our kids. Happy testing, if you are too!

Check back again soon!

Mrs. Ludwig

Happy Halloween!

We had a great time in the speech room with our Halloween-themed activities!

I brought back an activity that I did two years ago during my first year. The kids still talk about this game, so I decided to give it another go. Here's how it worked:

The kids had to reach into a set of 10 paper bags and feel for different items: goblin's toes, witch's skin, goblin's ear, vampire eyeball, etc. All real, of course! ;) Add a little spooky music from Pandora and dim the lights, and their imaginations get right to work!

At the end of the game, they found out the "body parts" were just edible items from the grocery store (see below).


LANGUAGE TASKS
Vocabulary: What did each item feel like? Spooky, creepy, slimy, soft, prickly? Here is the list of Halloween adjectives we used.

Vocabulary: Name fruits and vegetables in the bags after the game was finished. Some of the little ones were a little nervous to play the game and my secret had to be revealed before the end of the game.

Inference: I made a worksheet that had text clues about each item (e.g. The goblin's toes were orange, healthy, and full of vitamin A). The kids had to use the clues from the text + what they know (from feeling each item) to make their inference.

ARTICULATION TASKS
Say 5-10 words before each bag reveal. The bags were motivating and great reinforcer!

At the very end, the kids realized the monster parts were.......

Goblin's toes: carrots
Skin of a witch: onion skin
Witch's fingers: green beans
Goblin's ears: cauliflower
Frankenstein's eyebrows: broccoli
Bat's wings: dried apricots
Vampire eyeballs: peeled grapes
Ears of a mummy: sliced cucumbers
Nose of  a troll: strawberry
Brain of a black cat: spaghetti noodles

ARTICULATION GAME
We also played a game this Halloween season called FrankenSTEAL. It was a versatile game that can target many different skills. I made the game targeting some of my kids' sounds and also some regular past tense verbs. Here's a little preview of Frank's game:

Check out FrankenSTEAL here! ("sh", "r", and s-blends) 
And here is the FrankenSTEAL with regular past tense verbs: FrankenSTEAL Regular Past Tense Verbs


Have fun trick-or-treating and don't forget to brush your teeth! Happy Happy Halloween!! :D

~Mrs. Ludwig