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

December & January....are gone!

Hello blog friends!

It's been awhile since I've posted....where has the time gone?? The craziness of the holidays carried over into January and things haven't seemed to slow down for one minute....not one single one! 

A brief peek at what went on in Mrs. Ludwig's Speech Room close to winter break and into January:

Oral language practice while making reindeer pencils: wrapping pipe cleaners around the pencil & gluing on a nose.

We made these in an individual after-school session to take home to mom. Practicing our good oral language skills:

"I am putting frosting on my cookie. 

I am putting marshmallows on my cookie. 

I am putting candy canes on my cookie." 

And what did you just do? 

"I made some cookies."

A sugar high? Mmm, yes. I think so.

And then we started using shaving cream (lots of shaving cream) in Mrs. Ludwig's speech room! I had seen the shaving cream snowmen floating around on Pinterest, so we got some shaving cream and glue and made our own! 

1 part shaving cream + 

1 part Elmer's glue = 

fun puffy paint

We put a hat on his head. The bottom snowball was bigger than the middle snowball. And of all the snowballs the top was the smallest.

And then shaving cream became our motivating white board. I used it for phonological awareness: draw 4 boxes and make them tap each box as they segmented CCVC words.

And also for writing sentences:

 So motivating!

And for vocabulary,

write an antonym for clean:

And for the fluency kids,

show me what "smooth speech" looks like:

Now show me "bumpy speech":

Who knew shaving cream was so versatile? :)

In January, I also was working hard on a professional development presentation for my husband's pediatric dental residency class. His program invited me to come in and talk about speech pathology as it relates to the dental world. It was a great experience and a great review of all my craniofacial, voice/resonance, and language development materials from grad school!

Diggin' up my old textbooks for graphics & citations.

....and now Happy February! I've been working hard on some new materials for Valentine's Day to use in Mrs. Ludwig's Speech Room. Here's a sneak peek:

A rhyming book for my little kids:

....and some more! Check back for the full post very soon!

~Mrs. Ludwig

A Few Resources

I wanted to throw down a post dedicated a few resources. Okay, here we go!

READING COMPREHENSION
ReadWorks.org - it's amazing! Just create a log in and you can get access to tons of FREE informational text passages and suggested kid books that target specific skills. You can search for passages by lexile levels or by skill sets (e.g. cause & effect, fact/opinion, figurative language, vocabulary in context). All of them are aligned to the Common Core Standards.

Perrrrrfect!

VOCABULARY: www.freerice.com. The kids get to build vocabulary while donating rice to help feed the hungry. How motivating is that, right? The words get harder as you get more right and easier as your success rate plummets. I like to use it with the middle schoolers and high schoolers because you can choose to target academic vocabulary & SAT prep words. It looks like this:

iPAD APPS
I am blessed to have several iPads to use with my speech kids at school and have been collecting lots of apps to use in my speech room. Here's just a few I've enjoyed using:

Sentence Builder

The kids get to choose from a set of words to make grammatical sentences. There are 3 different levels and an option to turn on/off reinforcers. They kids think the dancing animals are pretty funny when they get the sentence correct!

AudioNote

A voice recording app. How I use it: To collect my language samples and responses during evaluations (e.g. the CELF-4 recalling sentences). I started off with the free version and eventually ran out of space so I upgraded to the full version. I use it all the time.

Camera

The standard camera. A few of many ways I use it:

1) To practice speech sounds. It's a great visual reinforcer to have the kids look at themselves while they produce the  target sound. (e.g. "Ohhhh, that /r/ looks like a /w/..." I stopped counting a long time ago how many times I've used that phrase.) 

2) Snapping pictures around the school for vocabulary practice with my lower language kids.

3) The video function as a "Let's pretend we're on TV and interview each other." Elicits questions and answers to wh- questions. Win, win.

Doodle Buddy

A free drawing pad for kids. A few ways I use it: 

Following directions activities (e.g. "Draw a square under a circle").  Hangman to target question syntax,

 "Is there a ____." & copula verbs, 

"No there IS not a ____." Arts-infused therapy!

And....CUT! The first of many posts dedicated to my iPad usage in the speech room.

I'm excited to announce I will be attending the ASHA Convention this week in Atlanta....yessss! I am SO excited to get some new ideas, resources, and CEUs. Check back later for ASHA updates!

Thanks for checking in! :)

~ 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



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