Snowman Ornaments

A quick rewind to the week before winter break to document our snowman lightbulb ornaments! I found this cute project after a Google search for "ornaments to make with kids"…or something like that and then gave it a little speech-language twist for use in MLS&LR.

I did a trial run the night before 

just to make sure it was going to work!
This one was mine:

When I told Mr. Ludwig all that the project involved (glitter, paint, and spray adhesive), he expressed some reservations as to whether this really was the best idea. I already had all the supplies, so there was no turning back. Ha. ;)

Here's the supply list:
-Lightbulbs (I used clear ones)
-Spray adhesive (I found it at JoAnn Fabrics)
-White glitter
-Puffy paint - orange & black
-Hot glue gun
-Twigs from outside
-Twine
-Mixing bowls

Our ornaments ended up being a 2-day project. The first day was the glittering and painting.  The second day was the glueing arms and tying twine. Both days involved a spoken and then written narrative for some nice expressive language practice.

Step 1: Spray the lightbulbs with a light coat of spray adhesive. 
Disclaimer: I will warn you that the spray adhesive does smell pretty awful, so I was the "official sprayer". I took each bulb in the hallway and gave them a quick spray down.

Step 2: The kids held their bulbs over the mixing bowls and shook glitter all over their bulbs to made sure they were completely covered. 

Step 3: Then, they set their bulbs on the paper to dry.

Step 4: Next, it was time for the puffy paint. Each kiddo got a Post-It note to practice painting. I demo'd that if you squeeze too hard, you will get a big 'ol glob of paint. Not good.

So as we say….

Dot, dot, not a lot!

Once the kids were confident painters, 

it was time for the real deal!

And after they were all painted, 

we set them down to dry. 

And then we wrote down the steps

for a nice procedural narrative! 

We incorporated synonyms for those who needed synonyms

and verb tense for those who needed verb tense.

****Fast forward to Day 2****

Step 5: We attached the arms with hot glue.

Step 6: And tied twine around the top to finish off the ornament.

And then we used our leftover time 
to finish our writing pieces:

The kids were really creative and 
they all turned out pretty darn cute. 
Here are a few of these cute little guys: 

And there you have it!

We tried hard to keep our glitter contained, but I think we will have glitter in our  speech & language room for a very, very long time.

Thanks for checking in!

Mrs. Ludwig

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

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