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

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

Welcome!

Welcome to Mrs. Ludwig's Speech Room! My name is Julianne Ludwig, M.A. CCC-SLP and I am a school-based speech-language pathologist working in an urban school with kids K through 12. I'm starting this blog as a project to document what goes on in my speech room and keep track of all my materials and ideas. Come back and visit often to check out my speech therapy ideas, my favorite resources, my self-made materials, cool educational links, and all things SLP. Phew, welcome to my project.

Thanks for stopping by my room. Come back & visit often! :)