Bath/Utility Carts for Card Organization

I decided one Saturday to hit my local Goodwill, and I saw a lady carrying out a metal three tier cart that made my heart sink because I knew it would be perfect for my speech room, and I knew there would be no more like it inside for the few dollars she most likely paid.

A few years ago I nabbed a four pack of the Super Duper card deck garages on special for a really great price.

I keep them connected together on the floor behind my therapy table so I can grab all of my favorite Super Duper card decks.  The two on the left side contain my artic cards, and the two on the right contain my language cards.

The problem was I had a lot of card decks from other companies such as  the Speech Corner Double Deck cards and Linguisystem cards that are wonderful but come in a big box. 

I also wanted to have these cards within reach, so I was so excited to see that cart being carried out by the Goodwill shopper because I knew those big boxes would fit neatly underneath my white board against the wall behind my therapy table where I could just swing behind me and grab the card decks I needed.

Here are my carts:

I got mine from the bathroom section at my local Target, and I did pay twenty for each.  But they come with wheels so I can easily move the carts, and they are worth it for me to be able to easily access my materials. 

What are some of your favorite organizational tools?

TAPPLE

Ever get a gift card from a student and not sure what to spend it on?  Several of my students gave me cards for Teacher Appreciation Week, and one was a $25 gift card to Barnes and Noble.  I absolutely adore B & N, but the possibilities for purchases were just too many!  I ended up getting the game TAPPLE.

What is TAPPLE?  Here is a much more concise description from Amazon than I could put into words myself:
"Choose a category card and start the timer on the TAPPLE wheel. In just 10 seconds, name a word matching the category, press the first letter of that word on the wheel, tap the button to reset the timer, and pass it along. Letters already pressed may not be used again, so the pressure mounts! Can’t think of a word in time, you’re out for the round. The player that collects the most cards wins!"

I brought it out for my third through fifth grade students for the last few days of school.  It gets harder and harder to find engaging games for my older students, and this did a great job of meeting many language goals for my students while also being a quick and fun reinforcer for my students who would practice their goals a set number of times and then we played a round of TAPPLE.  It is really easy to explain the game to students, there is basically nothing to set it up, and you don't have to keep score-  just add up the cards collected at the end to determine a winner.

I would not typically get a game with a bookstore gift card, but I knew I could use it for a lot of groups and in more ways than a hardcover book.  My biggest compliant with brick and mortar stores is that the majority of books they carry are hardcover and really expensive!  I always look for getting the most use for the money I spend, and sometimes that means a game instead of a book. 

What are some of your favorite go-to games?

Book Linky

Deanna Jump is hosting a linky party for favorite books each Tuesday this summer that bloggers love.

Oh, how I LOVE children's picture books!  I secretly wish I could be a children's author, but in the meantime, I get to enjoy reading them.  I posted before about my love of Kevin Henkes books, and one I really enjoy using for therapy is Chrysanthemum. 

This is such a great book for conquering the Common Core "shades of meaning" goals-  or in my speech world-  CONTEXT CLUES!

Check out this sample of a page from the book.  On one page alone we get great juicy vocabulary words like "scarcely", "precious", "priceless", "fascinating", and "winsome".  Such lovely synonyms!  I think this is one of the reasons why I love Kevin Henkes book-  he sprinkles such wonderful words in his books-  he never talks down to children. 

 

This book is frequently recommended as a beginning of the year book in classrooms, and I echo that idea.  It would be great in speech therapy as well.  Give each student a name tag to decorate their name and look up in a baby name book what their name means and where it comes from-  starts great conversation!  The tags can then be placed on their speech folders for the year. 

 

There are also book companion packets for this gem of a book on TPT, as well as tons of free activities and lesson plans on the web.  The book easily fills a 30 minute therapy session with plenty of language and articulation practice, as well as a great story about respecting individuality, and handling teasing (which some of our students face when they have trouble saying the sounds in their names).

It truly is precious and priceless and fascinating and winsome!

SLP M.I.A.

Whew!  I can't believe I survived the final weeks of school, and already had my beach vacay! 

Unfortunately, the craziness of the past few weeks kept me from posting!  I hope I don't slack off again this summer!

So I told one of my grad school friends that I planned to spend at least one week this summer doing absolutely nothing speech related.  Oh, my, the hubris of the frazzled!  During vacation I had to read all of my SLP peep blogs while I was at the beach.  Plus, all Facebook related forums-  and I couldn't help buying more supplies for the next year.  I bought a game from the Salvation Army at Pawley's Island:

And two games from the cutest toy store in Litchfield Beach called The Toy Isle:

The Pizza Party game is a dice game where you roll toppings  (dice) to add to your pizza slice (each slice is different), and the popper game is just to do something different for next year when I do my beach theme.  I already have a penguin popper and Easter bunny popper, but this guy was just too cute!

I do not think I will be able to go a whole week without doing something speech-related since I found out the afternoon before our final day of work that I was switching rooms.  EEEKKKK!  Thank goodness the next day was a work day and my resource team helped me put twenty years of materials onto carts to go from one hall to another in a day!  Now I get to redo my room since I will have a whole new color scheme ..... like my weeks of printing out all of my TPT purchases from the last big sale wasn't enough to keep me busy!

What are your plans for the summer break?

Marshmallow Fun

So I was cruising Pinterest last night as I always do, and found this cute pick for a game that makes a fun treat for the speech room:

The site that described the game can be found here.

I plan to "speechify" it by doing the following:
Take a piece of regular copy paper and draw the circles inside of a temple of an oval that when cut out looks like a mouth.  Feed pink construction paper through the copier and copy the template to it and then cut out the mouth so it looks like the one in the picture.

When students come in for speech, I will have them practice their speech sounds 20-25 times before they can add the marshmallows to the circles for their "teeth".  Then, we will play the game as follows:  after practice of their goals, they roll a dice and remove that many marshmallows off of their gameboards and into their mouths!  The first person to get all of their teeth off first wins. 

This will be great for my language groups as well since we can read one of the following books from my stash to practice our language goals before we roll:

I bet your school library has many choices of fun books to choose from!  What did I ever do before Pinterest?????

Feeling Beachy

Three more weeks until I really get to go to the beach with my family....but in the meantime, I have 53 kids to get data on for progress reports and tons of meetings to attend-  not to mention IEPs to write!  All of this with daily schedule changes thanks to field days, grade level music programs, field trips, etc...... 

So, this frazzled SLP brought the beach to the speech room this week!

We started with a story (one of three standbys:  Pout Pout Fish or a Rainbow Fish Adventure)-

Followed by a fish coloring activity (using shiny, sparkly smiley face stickers as fins thanks to seeing this idea on Pinterest)

And throw in either the game Jolly Octopus, or a Fishing game, and our Speech Beach Week is complete!

What fun activities and books do you use for beach theme?  I can't wait to print and laminate by Beach Grammar packet from Jenn Alcorn at Crazy Speech World (available at Teachers Pay Teachers), but just did not have enough energy or time to get it ready in time for this past week!

A Huge Organizational Feat!

First, let me start this post by stating that state testing is finally over (I have read tests aloud four days in a row for some of our students who have this accommodation, and I've only seen four of my speech groups total in the past three school days-  yikes!-  but that is the way it happens when you are a test administrator for small group testing)!

Second, let me be honest and say I am getting older, I'm always tired, and I can't remember half the time what I own, what I still want, or what is in my therapy room.

Any-hoo, I started thinking yesterday about what I wanted to do with my students next week when we are back to a somewhat regular schedule, and I just couldn't picture if I had a certain book in my library.  My Type-A, perfectionistic self decided I was going to stay after school and bite the bullet on organizing all of my books because I just can't take the mess that is my book collection anymore. 

So, I started with my picture books!  Here is a sample of my titles in a visual format:

Now, I don't know about you, but I have tried many ways to organize my books in the past from a spreadsheet in Excel to a fancy app on the iPhone that reads ISBN codes and organizes your library.  The problem with these are:
1)  I am visual and like to see the covers, and
2)  The storage for the app ate up memory and I had to look up pictures for some of the books and ISBN numbers that wouldn't be read correctly so I quit that after ten minutes.

Instead, I grabbed a handful of my books from the shelf, went to Amazon.com, and began entering the title in their search engine.  The great thing about Amazon is it begins to fill in titles for you so most of the time, you don't have to enter the whole title in there-  check out what I mean below:

So while I am typing out scaredy, titles begin to appear and then I just go down and click on the book "Scaredy Squirrel".  That picture comes up and I right click on the picture and then chose "Save as Picture".  I then type in the title of the book, and save it in a folder I have on my travel drive labeled "Picture Book Pics". 

In order to see the picture and title in that folder, I simply open the folder up, and then right click anywhere inside it until the option for "view" comes up like below:

Then I click on large icons, and there is my library-  in a visual format I can see even without my reading glasses!  Now I am able to quickly scroll through and see just which "There Was An Old Lady Who...." and "Night Before..." books I have and which ones I need.  I can also hit print screen and paste the screen pictures into a word document or Publisher file and print it out to have a paper copy as well.  I also added the file to my dropbox account so if I am out and about shopping, I can open it up and see if I need a book or if I already own it.  Seriously, I am really bad about remembering which "Old Lady" books I still need!

Why didn't I do this before???  It is so easy, and Amazon found a picture of every book in my library- and I had some really out of print books.  Now I can group them by category or holiday as well.  So over the moon with this project.  In all honesty, this took me just under two hours by myself to catalogue almost four hundred books.  Not too bad!

So I started doing the same thing with my games!

Again, Amazon was my go to place for this.  They also carry many of the Super Duper products I use, and some LinguiSystem ones.  Now I have the beginning of a game inventory as well!  I have also created folders for pictures of my Super Duper products (I went to their site and entered product names for the things I already own):

I have made picture files for TPT Purchases (just look under the "My Purchases" tab and you can right click to "Save as picture" for each thing you have purchased), LinguiSystem items, Speech Corner items, and various speech materials. 

I  now have a visual library of my materials I can access from anywhere, and I have these pictures available for me when I start making visual lesson plans like the ones posted by Jenna Rayburn and Super Power Speech using the materials I own. 

Hope this idea might help you as well!  Thanks for stopping by!

The Mouth With a Mind of Its Own- New Therapy Book

One of the biggest challenges I have is when a new student starts speech therapy.  Depending on their age, it can be a little tricky explaining why they need to come for  therapy.  Even the most self-aware child can feel sensitive about the way they talk, and the last thing I ever want to do is to make them feel negatively about themselves.  Pat Mervine at Speaking of Speech has written a great new book:  The Mouth With a Mind of Its Own.  I was able to preview a copy of the book, and I am sharing my thoughts of this book with you!

 

The basic premise of the book is as follows:  Matthew has trouble getting his mouth to say what he is thinking.  He just can't seem to tame his mouth.  Thanks to his new SLP, Mrs. Hicks, Matthew learns how to take control and effectively communicate with others around him. 

 

I liked this book for many reasons, and the main reason is that Matthew reminds me of students I have worked with- especially when others, including me, can not understand the child when they say their own name.  Another positive is that the book gives readers a look inside the world of speech therapy by illustrating the various tasks one would do to be a better commnicator including auditory bombardment, learning about speech helpers, and the work/steps involved in articulation therapy.  I like that it accurately captures the speech therapist role and speech therapy process from rubber mouth puppets, tongue depressors, and mirrors to the need for daily practice and the amount of time required to learn so many different sounds. The metaphor of "taming my mouth" is a great idea (it  even shows Matthew's idea of what he thinks it means and then what it really means where you start with the lips and move on to the teeth, jaw, and then the tongue).

 

A huge bonus point goes to the inclusion of the following fact-  speech therapy is a work in progress-  it takes time and practice both inside the speech room and out!  And kudoos to the author for making Mrs. Hicks an encouraging therapist always ready to support Matthew throughout the whole process.

The illustrations are colorful and I like how the sounds Matthew needs to work on and what he says is in a bright yellow to emphasize the book is about his speech sound improvement.  Overall, the book uses light humor well to reassure children with speech sound issues that they will improve with therapy while also providing validation of their feelings that it is frustrating and difficult to tame one's mouth.  I think this book would be a welcome addition to any therapist's shelf. 

Check it out at Pat's site, or by cliking the book title link above!

TPT Linky Party: What's In My Cart

Jenna at Speech Room News is holding a Linky Party about the upcoming Teachers Pay Teachers Sale for Teacher Appreciation Week.  Most TpT Sellers will put their store on sale on Tuesday and Wednesday (May 6-7th), plus you will have an extra code to use in order to take an additional percent off of all materials on the site! I am so excited about this sale, and I'm listing my top choices on my LLLOOOOONNNNGGGG wish list below:

1)  Comparing and Contrasting SpeechPads
So many students with this goal, and can always use new ways of teaching it.

 

2)  Speech Camp Expressive Language Activities

Cute graphics, great pack with good end-of-the-year theme

 

3)  Reading Skills Pack-  Context Clues

Ton of students with this goal and can always use more context clues materials

 

4)  Be A Grammar Ninja

I don't think I ever buy from a big TPT sale without getting at least one product made by Mia McDaniel.  Love the graphics and always need grammar materials.  My boys will love this!

 

5)  Visuals for Vocabulary 



These posters from Jenna Rayburn are terrific and much needed.

I can't wait to read what is in everyone's cart!  I always end up with new products I missed.  Happy shopping!

Parrot Pile-Up

Ahhh, May is here, and state testing is next week.  We have been doing a pirate theme this past week, and you know that includes all of the regular standbys such as the book "Pirates Go To School":

 

Pop-Up Pirate:

 

Pirate Talk:

 

Pesky Pirates:

 

And, now, my latest find- Parrot Pile-Up.

If you have read this blog before, you know I am all about finding games and activities that cover multiple goals.  Winner, winner, chicken (parrot) dinner-  this little game can do it!

 

Each player gets a beach scene card, and they load one piece of their cargo on the raft with the parrot and "drive" it from their beach card to the other player's beach card without losing any cargo along the way (or while they are stacking it on the raft).  I love that this game is a reinforcer for any skill you practice using your handy flashcards or iPad apps, and it has a ton of words and vocabulary built-in as well. 

 

My /r/, vocalic /r/, and r-blends students had plenty of words to practice by naming the items that are a part of the game-  parrot, raft, red, barrel, crate, triangle, rectangle, and fruit.  



 

Now I love me some Pop-up Pirates, but my older kids think it is a little young for them.  This game was enjoyed by all ages and all groups (and they kept saying the pieces reminded them of Angry Birds-  more /r/ practice).  Gotta love a game like this!  I found mine for eight dollars at Tuesday Morning (hope you have one in your area).  It is also available at Amazon (link above) for just a few bucks more. 

Thanks for "flying" by!