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

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

Vocabulary Instruction: a presentation for teachers

After I presented to our staff on language impairment (You can find that presentation HERE!), I had a teacher come find me with a cool vocabulary dictionary to share. She told me that I could present it to our staff if I thought it was a good resource. I suggested that we present it together (collaboration, yes!) and used it as an opportunity to provide more professional development to our teachers on the topic of vocabulary, an area that lots of our language kids work on in speech-language therapy.

And that's how Part 2 of my professional development presentation for our teachers came about:

I had just read an AWESOME book: Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction by Beck, McKeown, and Kuchan (2002), which has been referenced in TONS of academic and professional circles. 

If you haven't checked this one out, you should! I came across it first in some of my online research. Then, one of my principals listed it as one of her favorite books in a staff e-mail. And at that point, I knew I had to have it and with a 1-click stop in my Amazon shop, the book quickly arrived on my doorstep. The book was also mentioned in one of my ASHA sessions last November in Atlanta. It's everywhere!

Bringing Words to Life was the basis for the following slides and talking points. So part 2, here we go!

A quick overview to start:

I highlighted the key points from my previous presentation on language impairment that were related to vocabulary.

Also included was some pretty 
important research with some pretty big implications:

And then I talked about the relationship between vocabulary and reading comprehension, which is a big struggle for a lot of language-impaired kids. 

My example was this: 

Take this paragraph and pretend 

you don't know the red underlined words...

...which would mean you're essentially reading this:

Now given that, can you answer main idea/detail or inference questions about it? Probably not.

Then I introduced Bringing Words to Life, which has practical suggestions for both 1) what to teach and 2) how to teach vocabulary.

The authors note that conventional wisdom teaches us that we learn vocabulary from context. Before entering school, kids learn from an oral context. Once kids get to school, there is a shift in focus to acquiring words from written text. There are several state and common core standards based on using context-clues to learn words.

The authors argue that oral language contexts are much more conducive to learning vocabulary because of the added intonation and meaning available. Using written text as the primary source for vocabulary acquisition becomes even more of an issue for struggling readers. 

  

If a kid can't decode very well and most of the brain power is focused on figuring out what the word is, the chances that he or she is learning what the word means is probably slim to none.

Even with good decoding skills, not every word meaning can be deduced based on the context. 

See the below example:

...hard to tell the tone of that paragraph unless you already know what the word grudgingly means.

The authors introduce Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 words. Tier 2 words are the academic words that are especially important for reading comprehension.

The authors recommend the following:

When the authors write about student-friendly definitions, they say that longer definitions with lots of information are better for leaning and understanding words than some standard dictionary definitions. 

For example, take a look at the word disrupt in the following example:

...words may be commonly misused if a standard dictionary definition doesn't capture the essence of the word. Student-friendly definitions are preferred!

At the end, I brought the information back to the classroom and encouraged teachers to 1) read the book if they were interested, and 2) have rich verbal environments in the classroom to benefit not just kids with a language impairment, but all kids!

Teachers can:

• Teach the kids to pay attention to new words
• Connect with words beyond just the classroom
• Use various dictionaries: unabridged, learner 
• Use vocabulary words in morning meetings and on notes
• Have a word of the day
• Use crosswords and scrabble games to make vocabulary fun and exciting

...teach kids to love words! What ways do you create rich-verbal environments in your speech and language rooms? What ways do you see teachers doing this in the classrooms? I'm curious!

And so ends my PD Presentation Part 2. My principal has already requested a part 3 presentation on a new topic for next year, so stay tuned!

Thanks for stopping by!

Mrs. Ludwig

p.s. As I've written this, I just found a post that was written by Jenn over at Crazy Speech World about how she collaborated with a teacher to create student-friendly definitions based on Beck, McKeown, & Kucan's work. Love it! Check it out HERE! :)