July 2021: “Beach Daze”
TPT Seller of the Month
How to Catch a Mermaid
Do you use the How to Catch a… series in therapy yet? If not, you need to start! This series is great to use for a variety of ages. The pictures and storyline are engaging for our younger students, and the vocabulary, themes, and content are appropriate for our older elementary students! It's a win-win for a busy SLP with a varied caseload.
Literacy-based speech therapy is perfect for targeting almost all of your goals in mixed groups! Consider using How to Catch a Mermaid to target:
- Ocean-themed vocabulary
- Describing pictures/scenes
- Formulating sentences with a variety of verb tenses
- Answering factual and inferential questions
- Sequencing
- Problems and solutions
- Conversations, turn taking, and asking questions (what would you do if…)
Scratch & Scribble
These are a unique and fun multisensory activity to add to your speech therapy toolkit! These are great for individual rewards, breaks, or fillers between turns. Better yet, your group can work as a team to reveal the hidden picture as you scratch. You can use various items to scratch - great for requesting and discussing the differences in technique and result. How fun!
Plush Ball Jelly
These are so fun and motivating! Use this to grab the attention of your students and find them requesting “more” and “my turn” in no time. Add this to your sensory bin or choice bag for the early communicators on your caseload. Speaking of choice bags (or boxes, or bins!): I love to have a variety of motivating objects available to pair with a student’s AAC device. Sometimes I will keep this handy just in case my planned activity doesn’t… go as planned. This is a great way to work on requesting, accepting or denying, stopping or starting a task, describing, and more.
Your students will use their AAC tools, whether high or low tech, to request, comment, and share their opinions about the Plush Ball Jellies:
- Core Vocabulary: in, out, want, like, again, more, yes, no
- Fringe Vocabulary: squeeze, colors, animal name
CH Sound Visual
These dry-erase CH cards are the perfect tool to add to your “quick screening toolkit” that you’re always adding to (or wishing you had time to create)! They are easy and convenient to use during a screener, as a warm up or exit ticket, or even as an in-class visual for a student who is beginning to generalize skills. I can’t wait to see these available in more sounds!
Sequencing Cards
This month our Spark Innovations sequencing cards set all about a Day at the Beach aka my favorite place to be! I love these sequencing cards (and building up my collection each month!) because they offer such a variety of uses for our therapy sessions every day. Use this set to “spark” (get it?) conversations about everyone’s favorite vacation they’ve been on, or why they liked or didn’t like a place they’ve traveled to. This type of conversation is great for targeting a variety of goals (sentence formulation, articulation, vocabulary, etc), but also is an amazing opportunity to build relationships as a speech group or between therapist and client. I love talking about things I have in common with my students, and they always remember those details!
Recently I used my Spark Innovation sequencing cards to get baseline data for an upcoming review of goals. I gave my student 5 target words and he needed to use those words in sentences. I was able to collect data on: articulation, sentence formulation, story sequencing, and expressive vocabulary. Win-win!
SLP Sticker
“Just Keep Swimming” is just the saying I need to get through teaching Extended School Year this month! I’ll be keeping this @gingerspeechie sticker front and center on my notebook. Check out more stickers from Elizabeth here!
SLP Mousepad
Hair Clip
I love the “just because” items in each Speech Cube! What fun items have you discovered? I’m still really into the satin scrunchies!