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

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

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!