Spooky Speech & Language Spiders

Happy October!

Things are getting creepy in Mrs. Ludwig's Speech & Language Room with spooky spiders! 

Our door is covered!

I do admit, I HATE spiders (just ask my husband), but these little guys turned out pretty cute. The legs, bodies, and heads were all cut out and ready to glue together...and ready to target lots of different goals!

For the Sound Spiders, the kids said their sounds to earn a leg, and then they used my metallic markers to write words on the legs.

A quick definition lesson identifying the spider's category and attributes was drawn on the board. When I initially asked for the definition of a spider, one of my kiddos said ..."a spider is something that eats you"

And then we learned...

that by animal we meant insect (or the synonym, bug)

that by eats you, we meant bites you and makes webs

Here we have Synonym Spider. The younger kids had to find pre-printed synonym matches, use markers to color matching words the same color, & then paste the pairs on different legs. 

This little guy has describing words on his 8 legs.

Spiders can be....small, big, brown, black, creepy, hairy 

I pulled these pictures from a TpT product I found here!

Here we have Initial /R/ Spider:

And last but not least Synonyms Spider v2.0 (for the older kids). The kids picked a word (e.g. funny, spooky, scary) and looked up synonyms in the thesaurus. I spy lots of base words and suffixes, too!

We also read a few books about spiders from ReadingAtoZ (a resource I LOVE!) The Spider's Web and Tarantulas. And worked on various language goals with those!

Eek...spider webs everywhere!

That wraps it up for the Spooky Spiders! Thanks for checking in, and hope you're having a wonderful fall!

Mrs. Ludwig

We are ballin' in March!

The craziness of March Madness is well underway and we have been shootin' hoops in Mrs. Ludwig's Speech Room! Basketball is one of those activities that is so simple, motivating, and never gets old with my kiddos.

We use a simple basket, some sports balls (baseballs that we pretend are basketballs), and a chair as a backboard.

The easy therapy tie-in:

How are the baseballs the same as basketballs?

How are they different?

The kids pick team names and we have everything from LeBron vs. Michael Jordan to a few of these creative selections:

 These Princesses were dominated by the Eagles.

And sometimes the kids mix in other sports/cities/states. 

WWE Champ John Cena vs. Hoosiers vs. Arizona Phoenix (?)

And then everyone gets a job: 1) the Score Keeper, 2) the Shooter, 3) the Shooter-in-Waiting, and 4) the Basketball Collector/Basket Fixer. 

Players have to do their speech work to earn their shots (e.g. 5 sounds, picture description, answer wh- questions).
After each turn, players rotate and switch jobs.

Fouls (-1 point) are given for: Shot blocking and poor behavior.

And 'tis the season for keeping track of a few different brackets! Our school does a pool and these are Mrs. Ludwig's picks. A few busts, but still a long way to go! Here they are:

Happy March & GO HOOSIERS! :)

Mrs. Ludwig

St. Patrick's Chipper Chat & A Visit From a Leprechaun

Can you believe it's the middle of March?! The time is flying! Here's a quick post about what's been happening in Mrs. Ludwig's Speech Room as March has been rolling along:

Chipper Chat is always a fan favorite in Mrs. Ludwig's Speech Room. The open-ended boards can be used in so many ways! And I love to use the versatile chipper chat pieces and magnetic "magic" wands in my other activities too!

Awhile back, I had the Ah-Ha! moment that the Chipper Chat pieces fit perfectly on the Bingo Dauber Art boards at DLTK Kids. There are so many options for different seasons and holidays.

We used these boards that come in color....

....and black and white!

We used the B&W version so we could color them. We spent one speech session coloring/cutting out boards while taking turns saying sounds. (Mrs. Ludwig's Rule: When it's your turn, freeze and put that crayon down!) And during the next speech time, we played our game.

When it's game time, we take turns rolling a die and whatever number is rolled is the number of speech sounds that need to be said.

Sneak a peek:

And in other news...we had a visit from Lucky the Leprechaun! He came to visit two of my scholars who stay after school for speech on Tuesdays. He left them this note:

As a side note: Apparently way too many of my kids have seen a movie about a scary leprechaun (I had to look up a quick movie clip to get up to speed and he is pretty scary! Ha), so I had to explain that Lucky is a very different and very friendly leprechaun.

Our friendly leprechaun, sent them on a scavenger hunt with clues. Each envelope came with a worksheet to fill in the grammar targets.

After each worksheet was complete, they followed the next clue from the envelope. At the end of the note trail, they found Lucky's gold in the last envelope:

Rich, rich!

And of course, since he asked, we had to let Lucky know we had found his gold. We filled in the blanks to write him a letter. Targets: expressive language, vocabulary, prepositions, etc. etc.

Unfortunately, when he comes to find us, his gold will be in gold foil crumbles. It turned out his gold had chocolate on the inside and it was just too good to resist. We decided Lucky might just appreciate us letting him know we had it.

And as I've been typing, it turns out my husband stole all my kids' gold for tomorrow.

I guess he better hope Lucky really is a friendly leprechaun...Ha.

On that note, that's all for now! Thanks for checking in!

Mrs. Ludwig

DOS: the "Uno-Like" Speech Sound Card Game

Time to introduce a game that I think will be in my therapy toolbox for a very long time. **drum roll, pleeeease**


The game is called DOS: the "Uno-like" Speech Sound Card Game (Dos as in Spanish for two). My kids LOVE to play Uno, so I made a game just like Uno with a few tweaks and modifications to make it work in Mrs. Ludwig's Speech Room.

My first version of the game targets the "sh" sound. You can download it for FREE from my Teachers Pay Teachers Store: Just give it a click! This is what it looks like: 

A full set of directions: 
Classic Uno Rules with a Speech Twist

"sh" cards for numbers 0 to 9 
come in 4 different colors

"Skip", "Reverse", and "Draw & Say 2" Cards 
come in every color

And WILD cards too!

I also made some additional add-on packs to incorporate different sounds when working with groups. Mix & match your DOS Decks to target lots of different sounds all within one session. You can buy some of the add-on packs for additional sounds in my TpT Store: Just give this a click.

Oh, that awful /r/...

I spy sp- & sk- blends:

Here's an example for the multi-target game:

• Use the 0-5 cards from the /r/ pack.
• Use the 6-9 cards of the s-blend pack.
• Include all the same Wild, Skips, Draw & Say 2s.
• Two targets in One big game.

Hey there, efficiency. 

A note on Target Selection:
I tried to choose mainly CVC words since there are no pictures on the cards. They will be easier for the little kids to sound out, which is good for spontaneous productions. Also good literacy practice for the first & second-graders! Bonus.

A quick note on Evidence-Based Practice: 
I love reading up on the new research in our field and incorporating the latest and greatest into my own therapy. I based my word selection off of my former professor's newest research article that considers Age of Acquisition (AoA) as a variable in treatment efficacy. 

Results: Later-acquired words were found to have better phonological generalization than early-acquired words. Also, the study provided more evidence that the late-8 sounds showed greater gains compared to middle-8 sounds. 

Targets were gathered from an AoA rating database (Kuperman et al. (in press)) and chosen based on an older age of acquisition. Cheers, to Evidence-Based Practice! 

Article citation: 
Gierut, J. A., & Morrisette, M. L. (2012). Age-of-word-acquisition effects in treatment of children with phonological delays. Applied Psycholinguistics, 33, 121-144. NIHMSID: 353839

Kuperman, V., Stadthagen-Gonzalez, H., & Brysbaert, M. (in press). Age-of-acquisition ratings for 30 thousand English words. Behavior Research Methods.

I hope you can find this useful in your speech rooms. Happy DOS-ing!!

Deuces,
Mrs. Ludwig

HERE!

Thanksgiving, here we come!

November is officially here! Phew, time is flying! Our school didn't get a fall break this year, so we are all anxiously awaiting our Thanksgiving break. Only a few more weeks to go!

As the temps have dropped in Indy and the Halloween candy is all on sale at the grocery story, I've found myself getting in the November mood. Time to start thinking about all the many million things we have to be thankful for. I'm always thankful that the holidays provide some extra inspiration for my therapy activities!

Here's a sneak peak at some of the activites we're using in Mrs. Ludwig's Speech Room. You can find them all in one big FREE pack in my Teachers Pay Teachers Store: Thanksgiving Speech & Language Pack

1) Preposition & Concept Memory Match. We play just like classic memory match but this time with a fun turkey teaching us important concepts!



2) We are also using this Thanksgiving scene for working on our sentences using is & are. It's also the Common Core Standard my first graders are targeting, so perfect timing to get some reinforcement. 

3) I also made some easy coloring sheets. The kids can color this cute turkey while taking turns practicing their sounds.

Here's a few my kiddos did at school. My 2nd graders are thankful for: 1) people that help the world & 2) gravity. Both solid choices.

4) Pronoun Sentences. The kids had to choose from the word bank to apply the appropriate he, she, they, him, her, it pronoun and write it on their worksheet.

5) I have a kiddo with Childhood Apraxia of Speech who is struggling with reading, especially the CCVC words. We have been working on segmenting those words, so I made some CCVC segementation cards with a visual to use with manipulatives.

Happy November and 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

Welcome!

Welcome to Mrs. Ludwig's Speech Room! My name is Julianne Ludwig, M.A. CCC-SLP and I am a school-based speech-language pathologist working in an urban school with kids K through 12. I'm starting this blog as a project to document what goes on in my speech room and keep track of all my materials and ideas. Come back and visit often to check out my speech therapy ideas, my favorite resources, my self-made materials, cool educational links, and all things SLP. Phew, welcome to my project.

Thanks for stopping by my room. Come back & visit often! :)