Activity of the Week: 4/4/16

This week was all about the theme of spring things.  The speech room was definitely blooming with adventures this week.

We started with self-contained special forces students and continued to target the theme of spring items, plants, and the concept of growing seeds. We had a fun worksheet to label concepts and for following directions.  We had a simple book about growing seeds to review the concepts and sequence (step by step order) of the process. We used an interactive vocabulary book by Speech Room News (Growing Carrots and Making a Garden) and paired it with a TechTalk AAC device to match, label (for non-verbal students), and practice joint attention to a task/activity.

Here is my graduate student, Julie, working with a student on joint attention, following directions, expressively labeling (confrontational naming and -WH questions), and matching color pictures,

Find the matching picture!

Here I am working with two students (separately) on various goals such as staying on topic, receptively matching, joint attention, and answering -WH questions with visual and verbal supports.

Other groups worked on inferencing and answering -WH questions with a silly "Ants in the Pants" themed game. Here is Chipper Chat, Inferencing fun deck, and the cootie game Ants in the Pants and the students loved this activity because of the silly bug theme and the game (remember, we play games to make the WORK FUN, not to "just play games."  That is a BIG pet peeve of mine.  I rarely bust out games in my classroom but when I do, it is to make the discreet language drills a bit more engaging and enticing. 

Most of my other groups worked on reading and comprehension strategies, as we have the ACT ASPIRE test to administer next week.  Here are some resources that I used that we reviewed and students took home for a homework packet to prepare themselves:

Reading Strategies

Comprehension and Reading Strategies

Reading Lesson Plans (these I used throughout the semester to TEACH my comprehension strategies. A great resource for teaching these skills first and then use it to reinforce good habits for close reading techniques, etc.) This can be used with ANY book which is really nice.

For our big self-contained project, we created flowers with construction paper and real sunflower seeds. We targeted vocabulary (level 1 and 2), locations (on top, next to, inside, above, below), colors, following directions, fine motor skills, requesting, and many more!  I love craftivity projects because you can simply target a multitude of skills with one activity, something I always advocate to those I am mentoring: work smarter not harder.  Pick one task or activity and try to adapt it to as many goals and skills as you can.

The finished products:

Simply beautiful!