Speechie Evie: Activity of the Week: 12/12/16

IT IS SPEECH FUN WEEK! That means that we have arrived at our end-of-the-semester party. In my last week's post, I mentioned how the party is earned through the completion of 1/2 their Mickey Mouse reward chart in their personal folders. Each student gets to participate but their reward chart determines how long they get to celebrate, that way no students are excluded in any way.

This is what one side of my classroom looks like:

I offer two types of cookies: Oreo and Chocolate Chip (chewy) and fruit punch to drink as well. For their sessions, students are able to pick a game or activity to play or they can choose an iPad of mine to tinker with. I have a good selection of basic board games and activities and I usually choose items that I do not typically use for therapy tools. I do not do any kind of formal lesson, but I do make minor prompts and corrections for things like grammatical utterances, articulation performance (depending on the level of practice for the student), and pragmatic needs. Speech fun holiday week is a good time for me to sit back and observe students to see if they have generalized learned skills into other activities or settings or conversational speech. In a way, I am collecting informal end of the semester baselines to compare with August performances.

Some students love to play in groups; other students like to just do "their thing." For this week, anything goes as long as it is EARNED from hard work.

For my special forces students, we went on a world journey and "visited" other countries to see how other cultures celebrate the holiday season at this time of the year. I had a fun pdf presentation and then we had videos of each country and how they celebrate the Christmas season. Each student had a personal "passport" and was given a flag to glue inside to serve as their "stamp" to show they had visited that country. They loved it! It was a great multi-sensory activity that had visuals, tactile and manipulable pieces, and they could personalize something to take home and share with their family.