My therapy room is buzzing with holiday excitement!  I am so excited about the products I purchased in the last TPT sale!  Some were from familiar stores and others I found through  SLP bloggers that highlighted what was in their cart.  I have already started putting several to good use.  Last week I spread out all of my holiday related materials to make my lesson plans for the next two weeks…it was such a calming feeling to have enough materials, stories, and ideas for all of my diverse groups. Here is a look at some of the things going on in my therapy room right now…

Would You Rather: Christmas Style

My students have really enjoyed these Would You Rather activities.  So far we have learned about our preferences for Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas .  Students have been able to share opinions, explain the reason why, take turns, use questioning skills, and practice all target speech sounds.  Sometimes it is the entire lesson but more often I use it as we enter or leave the therapy room.  This helps me use it as a quick assessment of carryover. My kids also love going around the school with these questions…we find parents in the hall, classmates, special area teachers, administrators, custodians, classroom teachers…anyone out and about gets our attention!  A huge shout out to our office staff…they embrace my students with such enthusiasm and genuinely engage them to work on these target skills.

Would You Rather cards displayed for ticket in /ticket out, conversational speech sample, and explaining WHY

My students have also loved finding out what that crazy old lady is up to again.  We have been reading “The Old Lady Who Swallowed a Bell” by Lucille Colandro.  Activities like the category sort, “I have…Who has” game, Roll the Dice, WH? cards, and sound cards address skills of sound production, vocabulary, categories , comprehension questions, comparing and contrasting, conversation, and sentence structure. There is something for everyone on this packet!

Artic, Vocab, Language,& Conversation (Old Lady Who Swallowed a Bell Edition)

Two wonderful products I was able to immediately use included “Winter and Holiday Inferencing” by The Speech Bubble and “Christmas Around the World” by Super Power Speech.  (Don’t you love all of the SLP resources available now!!)  I printed the inferences on red and green paper (there are two different levels so that helps me easily distinguish the set).  One of my groups needs a little more support for word recall, so before we started the questions we brainstormed some seasonal vocabulary.  I made a pitiful attempt to draw some pictures to go along with the words…good thing I have wonderful little artists in the group to help me out!

Winter & Holiday Inferencing by The Speech Bubble

Christmas Around the World by Super Power Speech

I have been able to use the Christmas Around The World set in a variety of ways also.  I have some 2nd-5th grade articulation students that are strong readers but really need to focus in on the production of certain sounds.  The reading passages are one page and full of meaningful content.  We are also able to do compare/contrast, comprehension questions, vocabulary, information recall, and peer interaction within my language groups.  The kids have been so interested and asking to learn about more countries (there are ten total…we get through one a day in my language groups, so we will not be able to cover them all).  I love that she provided simple visuals to go along with the content as well as a well-organized graphic organizer for the listening comprehension.  It makes for a great little packet to send home at the end of the week.

Garden of Time ~ showing how time grows from days into months into seasons

With all of this holiday buzz, I started to feel like my “Garden of Time” anchor chart/bulletin board was just not fitting in.  Too Springy for this time of year!  I  had been resistant to change it because I use it almost every session with my language groups.  It is literally right behind me when we are working at our group table and I can reach and point out the different aspects without even looking.  But, time for a change.  So, my students helped me create a much more appropriate winter wonderland of time.  We used the Gingerbread Craftivity from Jenn Alcorn at Crazy Speech World.

Creating our gingerbread men

Various groups throughout the day used skills of choice making, requesting, commenting, and questioning to build three gingerbread men.  We also read “The Gingerbread Man” and worked on actions and prepositions.  I love the choice making available through starfall.com, so some of the kiddos were lucky enough to build a gingerbread man online, focusing on choice making of colors and shapes.

Brrr ~ frozen with the language of time

At the end of the day, we had built a new wonderland of time.  I plan on keeping the background but switching out the gingerbread men with something different in January…stay tuned!

I’d love to hear what’s going on in your therapy room this time of year!