More Shamrocks: Categories and Synonyms

Happy March, blog friends!

The month of St. Patrick's Day and March Madness. I'll be cheering for the Indiana Hoosiers in the NCAA tourney, so I thought it was time to share my Hoosier spirit with a banner change! And also time to share a few more shamrocks - one for sale and one for free!

First up is Shamrock Categories, which is available for purchase in my TpT store:

The same shamrocks as the Word Families activity, 

but this time they've turned categorical!

It's aligned to this Common Core standard:

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.1.5a: Sort words into categories (e.g., colors, clothing) to gain a sense of the concepts the categories represent.

Here are the Shamrock Templates to cut out:

And the leaves to cut out and match with

their shamrock category:

 And a recording sheet for added reinforcement. 

Targets: pets, colors, seasons, punctuation marks, furniture, letters, insects, writing utensils, things you can read, clothing, and flowers

I had a group last Monday work on the Shamrock Categories activity and then they filled out this recording sheet today. I was excited how well they recalled the items we had gone over the week before!

And next up, Shamrock Synonyms. I'm posting this one up as a freebie. 

Same concept, new targets.

Check it out here!

Hope you enjoy the shamrocks in your speech rooms and come visit again soon!

Sincerely,

Mrs. Ludwig

Shamrock Word Families

St. Patrick's Day will be here so soon and we have already begun our celebration in Mrs. Ludwig's Speech Room! I've been working on a few resources, and the first one I'm putting up is the Shamrock Word Families to target phonological awareness skills:

Here are the CVC leaves...

....that go on these Shamock templates.

and a recording sheet too!

You can download by clicking HERE. It's also available in my TpT store!

And here is a peek of some shamrocks 

in live and living color:

Time to meet my husband at the gym, so check back for more resources soon!! :)

~ Mrs. Ludwig

Happy (Early) Valentine's Day!

Ah, I love that Valentine's Day is only 1 day away! A look at some of the activities we've been doing in Mrs. Ludwig's Speech Room & a few freebies!

We have been mending broken hearts with Broken Heart Synonyms. Match games & taking turns finding a match for your given card. Here's a look:

For the kindergarteners and 1st graders working on phonological awareness, we worked through a rhyming coloring book of the most classic love poem of all time. Just give it a click and download:

Roses are red,

Violets are blue,

Sugar is sweet,

and so are YOU!

At the end of the book is a rhyming exercise. Paste the words that rhyme with red, blue & you, and sweet on the correct pages.

An example of a finished product:

**A note on book assembly: the first page is the cover. Fold in half for the front and back. All other pages are folded in half and inserted into the cover. 
The side where the ends meet is placed directly into the fold of the cover. 

Staple when all pages are in place.**

And our versatile activity for articulation, language, and fluency: the lovely love elephant. You can find the template HERE!

5-10 sounds, set of questions, or tasks earned one piece of the elephant and at the very end, we glued them all together.


One of my little kids impressed me with his creativity. Given all the same pieces and a model elephant, he immediately requested to make a firebird instead. Take a look:

A true visionary! :)

Hope you enjoy and hope these activities are useful in your speech rooms, too!

Love,
Mrs. Ludwig

Happy Holidays Part 3: Antonyms are back!

By request, my Antonyms Cards are still available for download. I am posting the activity here: How Mrs. Ludwig Stole Antonyms

You can download all the same cards and the Antonym Sack, too! 

Hope you're all enjoying the hustle and bustle of the holiday season...only a few more days until break!

Cheers,
Mrs. Ludwig

Happy Holidays Part 2 - How the Grinch Stole...

Synonyms & Antonyms!

**update 12/11/2012**....but then it turned out that I actually stole The Grinch. Unfortunately, I was just informed the Grinch is trademarked. That means no more love for The Grinch this Christmas and no more Grinch for sale in my TpT store. 

Check back again soon for new, improved & non-trademarked materials!

In the spirit of legality,

Mrs. Ludwig

Happy Holidays! Part 1

Happy December, blog friends! A quick post to introduce my new Speech & Language Holiday Pack. Check out the images & check out my TpT store to download it for free! 

Get ready to break-it-down-now....

1) Wh- Questions about some cute little elves (this is my first attempt at some of my own original illustrations!). I also included some spatial concepts (e.g. "Who is first?") to target those skills as well.

2) Past & Present Tense Verb Sort: one for both regular & irregular verbs.

I spy regular verbs here:

And some irregular verbs there:

After sorting, the kids can write some 

sentences on this page:

3) A Pronoun Section with a few levels to differentiate within and between groups. Level 1 is the easiest and Level 3 is the hardest. Take a peek:

he, she, it, they, his, her, their, its, him, her, it, them

Included are a few pronoun teaching cards...

along with the pronoun strips and a 

fill-in-the-blank worksheet

 

4) Syntax Sort: Scramble 'em up & sort 'em back out. Then record them on the included sheet.

And there you have it...Part One of a few Happy Holidays posts! 

Check back again soon!

Cheers,
Mrs. Ludwig

ASHA Conference 2012

I have so much to report since the last time I updated Mrs. Ludwig's Speech Room! I had fully intended on updating day-by-day at the 2012 ASHA Convention, but my time there was SO busy & time got away!

Hello, Atlanta! 

(this was about all of the city I actually saw)

First off, it was AMAZING! So much great information. Here's a brief rundown on of my highlights:

• The opening speaker was Maya Angelou - pretty amazing! The best shot I could get:

"If you don't like something, change it. 

If you can't change it, change your attitude." - Maya A.

• There were so many great oral seminars that I often had to make tough choices about which one to actually attend!

• I gathered some great resources, tips & tricks. I'll post the best share-able resources here.

• The iPads at convention were EVERYWHERE! You know you're at a convention with SLPs, when.... :) And several sessions were dedicated to iPad use in therapy. 

A Few iPad Resources

The Opposites:

Cost: FREE

This one is pretty cool and I find myself even wanting to play! It's a little like old-school Tetris. Words float up and once you see an opposite pair, you click on the pair of words and they disappear. If the words pile up, you lose!


There are 10 different levels. 
Harder levels = harder words.
Level 1 (left) has easier opposites than Level 3 (right).







At the end of each level is a bonus round where you have 20 seconds to click all the opposites. I like this one!

The next iPad app is called Toontastic:

 

This app creates an animated comic strip with a beginning, middle, and end. It's a neat for storytelling and generating a narrative. Each box is a part of the animated comic strip: 

Setup, Conflict, Challenge, Climax, Resolution. 

You can delete or add any of the parts of the story
 if they don't work for your narrative.

When you click on the first box "Setup", you get to pick your Setting.

....or draw your own! One feature I wish it had is the option of adding your own photo.  But it doesn't, so I'll deal. :)

Then you pick your characters. Once they're all in place, you're ready to record your animation and narrative for the "Setting" part of your story. 

You record your story while moving your characters around. When you're finished, you can play your audio recording back along with the character movement that was added during your recording.

Once you complete the steps described above for each box (mine are still empty), you can play your entire comic strip story complete with animation and audio. 

Pretty neat.....and the best part.....it's FREE!

A few highlights from the Oral Seminars

For my younger LI/SI kids this session was really great:

Concomitant Speech & Language Impairment: Effect Practice for Optimal Outcomes. Presenters Ann Tyler & Gail Gillon

• Lots of my LI/SI kids struggle with literacy. This session offered lots of cool evidence-based resources that merge the research with practice. Go see for yourself!!

• Gail Gillon Phonological Awareness Resources - all free! 

• My Read It Again - awesome free stuff for language and literacy! 

• Explicit lesson plans for specific books

• Materials to print:

• Progress Monitoring Sheets

And for my upper elementary & middle school kids, this one was useful: 

SLPs Enhancing Students' Language Skills in STEM Disciplines. Presenters: Janet Proly, Karen Davis, Melissa Malani, and Kimberly Murza

• The STEM (science, technology, engineering, & math) disciplines are becoming a big focus in the academic world.

• For LI kids, math and science texts can be difficult to break down and are each written in their own language

• The presenters gave a handout for breaking down academic text. Here were their Top 10 Questions to ask for disciplinary texts:

....and that is a very, very brief look at my time in Atlanta, but I hope those resources/links are useful! 

Now that I'm back very professionally-developed and energized with lots of new ideas, I've gotten back to work on some of my therapy activities for the holidays! 

Here's a preview of my Holiday Packet I'm working on:  

Coming soon to a blog & TPT store near you! :) 

And since it's almost Thanksgiving, one more turkey for you! When thinking what she was thankful for, a cute kindergartner pulled out a Fruit Rollup from her pocket and copied the letters exactly (even the O!, we'll work on the S...). 

Enjoy your holiday, thanks for checking in, and have a very very happy Thanksgiving!!

~Mrs. Ludwig