One Lovely Blog

I have kindly been nominated for the One Lovely Blog Award by my fellow blogger and SLP, Renee. Her posts are thorough and clear, I love her writing. Check out her lovely blog here: 

Keeping Speech Simple

The rules for accepting the award are:
1. Thank and link back to the person who nominated you. Check!
2. Share 7 things about yourself. Check!
3. Nominate 15 other bloggers and comment on their blogs (usually on their about page or contact directly if necessary) to let them know. Check!

Here we go! 7 things about me:

*Disclaimer: You may some repeat facts about me from my Liebster Award post. It was kinda hard to come up with new facts!

1. I volunteered at a summer camp as a teen for kids with speech/language impairments and/or hearing loss. It is called Camp Hapitok and has been running for 44years. Due to recent changes in financing, they are having a crowd funding campaign. Check it out here if you would like to help.
I later became a speech therapist at that same camp after I graduated from college. I will be working there this summer as an SLP. Fun!
2. I was a Deaf Studies major as a freshman in college and planned on being a DHH classroom teacher. I changed my mind and took the SLP track instead. I know (some) sign language.
3. I ran my first half marathon in March, and am running my second this weekend. I don't even really like running that much. 

4. I recently began Crossfit. It is hard, but really fun and effective.

5. I presented at ASHA when I was in graduate school with my professor. 

6. I am a Michelle Garcia Winner addict. I own every product she publishes and/or endorses. She is totally "speech famous."

7. Reading is my favorite. I read all. The. Time. The problem is that my Kindle is near death, but Mother's Day is coming. Hint! Hint!

Now it is my turn to nominate some bloggers. There may be some repeat nominations from other bloggers, but these are the blogs I just really like, so I want to honor them!

*Disclaimer #2: Please don't think I am a weirdo when I comment on all of your blogs. It felt a little bit stalker-ish to be honest...

1.  A View Into my Classroom: Kelly is a DHH teacher and personal friend. Here blog is great, and so is she!


2. The Peachie Speechie: Not sure what I love more, her blog posts or her shop!


3. Crazy Speech World: This veteran blogger, Jen, is someone I have followed for-ev-er! Check her out, she is awesome!

4. Speech Room News: You all know Jenna, right? Great posts, and great idea. 

5. Speech Room Style: This is a great blog that features cool speech rooms. Additionally, Kathryn sends out weekly emails with links to SLPs on TPT. I get a ton of great materials each week thanks to this newsletter. You can sign up too on her blog!

6. The Dabbling Speechie: Felice is the author of a blog that has a lot of great ideas for all ages, especially Junior High. We all could use a little help there!


7. Speech to the Core: Lyndsey has an awesome series on her blog entitled "A Day in the Life" that features SLPs from all over the place. I love reading this feature each week to see the wide variety of what we all do!

8. SLP Chelsea: Chelsea has the most adorable blog, plus a lot of great ideas for therapy. 

9. Speech Peeps: This is another blog that I have been following for, like, ever. Nicole Allison has a great line of TPT products that I have a collection of!

10. SLP Natalie Snyders: Natalie will provide you with something to do TODAY in speech, she is awesome.

11. Speech Therapy Fun: Jennifer hosts another adorable blog. So creative, so cute, so informative.

12. Beautiful Speech: Love this grad student and SLPA. Kristen really "gets it," a lot more than I did in grad school!

13. Smart Mouth SLP: Heidi has great activities, especially for pragmatics. 

14. Consonantly Speaking: Here is a place to find a TON of ideas for therapy. It is a gold mine!

15.  Bright Ideas SLP: Whitney has great style, as is reflected in her blog design. Totally up my ally! 


Check em' out, and see you back here soon!

Tiny Objects

A fresh and fun activity that I have been doing in speech therapy is called Tiny Objects for Articulation. This is an activity that targets articulation development. Basically, each phoneme has a set of miniatures to use for articulation practice.

 

Although I created this activity for articulation therapy, I have also used it to practice fluency/stuttering strategies, syntax, categories, and EET. This game is flexible!

 

I have been putting together this activity for a while. I wanted to ensure that there were enough miniatures to make therapy sessions productive!  I had a storage container with small drawers that I found at a thrift store. But, these containers can be purchased at any hardware store. They are usually used to organize and store screws, nails, etc. Mine was a bit dingy, but some orange spray paint took care of that! 

 

Next, I used sticker letters from my scrapbooking stash on the front of each drawer to designate a space for the phonemes, and some blends. I then collected little things for each phoneme to store in these drawers. The objects are from Lego, Playmobile, bead shops, doll house websites, and our family toy collection. I always keep an eye out when I am shopping for things that will not only fit in the drawers, but also suit my needs for this activity.

These are the most popular items that the students love.

 

In (sort of) order: gumball machine, hippo, soldier, Batman, Ugg, fortune cookie, feather, cheese, swan, blow fish, mustard, plunger, Chinese food, french fries, train, Chinese checkers, chips, gingerbread house, sushi, dragon, flamingo, jar, cup, snail, clock, roller skate, scissors, teapot, bubbles, rose, orange juice, smoothie, Hello Kitty, princess, mermaid

Here is how I use it in therapy. Students are given a drawer with their target sound. During their turn, the student says each word so many times, or in a sentence, or a silly sentence with two words, etc. Then the next student goes. We go around and around until all the miniatures from the drawer are used for practice. This is a favorite in speech class! 

A goal that can be targeted during this activity might look like this:

By DATE, STUDENT will correctly produce PHONEME in the THERAPY/CLASSROOM/ETC setting at the WORD/PHRASE/CONVERSATIONAL/ETC level with 80% accuracy in 4/5 trials as measured by observation and data collection. CCSS ELA SL GRADE.1

or, with real words:

By 12/1/2015, Christy will correctly produce /s/ in the therapy setting at the word level with 80% accuracy in 4/5 trials as measured by observation and data collection. CCSS ELA SL 2.1

I hope you enjoy this idea!

I was Part of a Blog Hop Last Week

Thank you for participating in the Hopping Into Spring Newbie Blog Hop. I got a ton of visits to my blog, as well as a bunch of downloads of my freebie. 

So I want to give a big THANK YOU!

Did you miss the Blog Hop? Here is a list of all of the SLPs that participated. You can click on a name to go directly to their blog. Have fun!

1) Jennifer

From Speech Therapy Fun 

2) Chelsea

From SLP Chelsea 

3) Amy 

From Speechasaurus

4) Kristin

From Beautiful Speech 

5) Kim

From School SLP 

6) Noralyssia

From Yo Amo Speech 

7) Tami

From TLC Talk Shop 

8) Gabriella

From Middle School SLP

9) Lyndsey

From Speech to the Core

10) Me, you are here!

11) Renee

From Keeping Speech Simple 

12) Heidi

From Smart Mouth SLP

13) Keri

From My Speech Party 

14) Elizabeth

From  The Speech Owl

Camp Hapitok

 

Camp Hapitok is what it sounds like. If you close your eyes , say "Camp Hapitok," and listen to yourself: Camp Happy Talk. 

Some of you may know about Camp Hapitok. Some may not. But, for everyone out there who loves kids, camp life, and miracles, you already have a bit of the Hapitok spirit inside of you. 

I volunteered at this camp as a teenager, and later returned as a speech therapist. Camp Hapitok was founded in 1970 in San Luis Obispo, CA and serves children with speech/language disorders. Each camper is paired 1:1 with a specially trained teen volunteer (what I did almost 20 years ago) for 4 weeks of summer camp. I loved babysitting and working with kids, so camp was a perfect way for me to spend my summers. During camp, the teen volunteers and campers do everything thing together in a traditional summer camp environment - but the teen volunteer is always focused on their campers speech/language goals. Campers also get 30 minutes of intensive small group speech therapy each day, which is the job I did a few summers ago. 

Camp Hapitok runs one 4-week session each summer, and during those 4 weeks most campers meet or exceed their goals. It  was so amazing to see how fast campers met annual IEP goals using this model. In four weeks these campers meets a goal that was written for a year. It felt like I was witnessing miracles.  

And guess what else? It is completely free for campers to attend. Free room. Free board. Free supervision. Free speech therapy. 

Free camp life. 

So awesome. 

Heading into the 45th year, partnership with their lead sponsor - the County Office of Education - has changed, and Hapitok is in need of YOUR help to #SaveCampHapitok. Camp is a bit short on moo-la to sustain, not only for this summer, but future summers. How short? 55k. 

So, on behalf of The Old Indian (Hapitok alumni know that guy), I am asking for help. 

Dig deep for some camp spirit. I know all you former campers, parents of campers, camp counselors, and camp directors have camp spirit down in your heart. Down in your heart (remember that song?). Whatever camp you were a part of, that place gave you some spirit. I know it. 

Please help to give a whole new crop of campers, counselors, and staff a chance to have what we have.

Camp spirit.

There is a crowd funding campaign at Indiegogo. If you are willing and able, please go here to help #SaveCampHapitok

March in the Speech Room

Okay, so it is the last full week of March. But, this is what was happening in the speech room! Soon it will be April, so things will be a bit different. In fact, I am making some changes to the overall layout and design of my room. Check back soon for pictures!

Anyway, back to March.

Did you know that March 2nd is Dr. Seuss' birthday? And that it is also Read Across America Day? Think that is a coincidence? I think not!

I scoured Pinterest and got a lot of inspiration for my bulletin boards this month. The first features our old friend the Lorax with his beloved Truffula trees. 

Next was the bulletin board that alluded most of my students. I heard a lot of "What does 'Do you like and ham mean?'"

I mean really!

I thought this was pretty clever and obvious! "Do you Like Green Eggs and Ham?"

To go with the green egg theme, I picked up these foam eggs from Target to make synonym/antonym pairs. A couple of my speech groups found the matches to the broken eggs and put them on the board. The synonyms have straight cuts, and the antonyms have zig-zag cuts.

To round out the Dr. Seuss theme, we made hats and graphed goldfish crackers. 

The hats were used to target a variety of goals, such as feelings, articulation, categories, and adjectives. I furiously wrote on tiny pieces of paper while they practiced their goal. Then, they glued the little red bits onto the hat to make stripes. They look great in my window!

The tastiest part of the past few weeks (if you like goldfish) was graphing colorful goldfish crackers for this "One fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish" activity. I found the worksheet here for free from Kteachertaggart. The students placed their colorful goldfish crackers on the drawings of fish. We then filled out the bar graph with the corresponding information. I made label stickers for each student to further describe the graph with words such as: most, least, top, bottom, equal, same, longest, shortest, top, bottom, favorite. When we were done with all that work, they got to eat the crackers while they colored the the fish on their page to match the graph. 

It has been a fun month, but I am looking forward to the changes I have planned for my room. Hope to see you back here soon!

Welcome to the Spring Newbie Blog Hop!

Welcome to the Hopping into Spring Newbie Blog Hop. I am so happy that you are here to see my blog and check out a freebie in my TPT shop! I appreciate that you made all the stops on the hop to get here.  
 
I am an SLP working with elementary aged kids in sunny California. I have been blogging for about a year and love to connect with other SLPs on the web, especially through blogs, Instagram, and Pinterest. You can follow me on those social media sites too, just click on the links housed in my sidebar. 


The intention of the blog hop is for some new-to-blogging SLPs get their names out into the blogging world. We also want to help you get to know us and some of the products we offer in our TPT shops. We thought that a cool way to present the quality of our products would be to offer an exclusive freebie made especially for our Hopping into Spring Newbie Blog Hop. 

To celebrate my introduction to the blog world, I am giving you a spring themed speech therapy freebie. It is called Spring Pronoun Card Game. I made this game especially for our Hopping into Spring Newbie Blog Hop. It is a fun and easy card game that targets pronouns.


 

With 42 stimulus cards and 24 lose your cards (and get another turn) cards, students have the opportunity to learn and practice pronouns. This activity will help them to improve syntax skills as well as build their grammar knowledge. Here is a preview of some cards that will come with your free game.


 
 

 

 

Additionally, pronoun description cards are provided and can be used for direct instruction before the game begins. They can also provide a visual reminder to students as to how they are supposed to respond on their turn, whether it be he, she, it, or they.

 

This game will look best in color, but is still fun when printed in grayscale. Print and cut out cards on cardstock. Next, laminate everything. 

 
A variety of games can be played with your Spring Pronoun Card Game:

1. Cards can be used for an open-ended task (where students draw one card at a time and fill in the blank with the correct pronoun).

2. Cards can be placed in the center of the table. Each player takes a turn drawing a card. They provide the pronoun and keep the card. If they pull a cracked egg card, they must put all of their cards back in the pile. If they pull an Easter bunny card, they get an extra turn. Whoever has the most cards at the end of the game is the winner.

Download your copy of my Spring Pronoun Card Game here. 

Also, check out all of my other products in my TPT store here.

Thanks for stopping by! 

Next up in the blog hop is Renee at Keeping Speech Simple. Check her out here. Or, click the Hop to the Next Blog button below. 

If you are a bit lost, you can start at the beginning with Jennifer at Speech Therapy Fun. Click here or on the Hop to the Beginning button below. 

I would like to give a special thank you to Jennifer and Chelsea for organizing our newbie blog hop! You gals are awesome!

Thanks for coming, and I hope you come back soon!