Sunday, September 30, 2012

Speech Therapy Kit: S-blends Card Sets and Resources

/s/-blends $21.95

Check out additional resources in the store!
Automatic discounts of 20-30% apply when buying 2 or more sets.

Need to teach a child to make S-Blends?

Motor-Speech Articulation Method:
/s/-Blends Card Sets and Resources

This comprehensive eResource has been designed from the ground up to take a motor-speech approach to speech therapy. Target words are simple in syllable shape and avoid consonant blends and vocalic /r/ sounds. They are sortable by increasing difficulty of phonemic complexity. Begin with the easiest cards and work your way up to harder ones. Every set includes phonemic variety in order to practice with different coarticulation effects and maximize carryover and generalization.

All therapy cards are illustrated in color. The resource is written to be accessible to both speech therapists and parents working with children at home. This eResource is ideal for targeting /s/-Blend productions when working with children with Childhood Apraxia of Speech, Phonological Disorders, Simple Articulation Disorders, Hearing-Impairment, and any other population that needs work to remediate speech.

Printable Resources Included:

Initial /sk/ Resources	Initial /sl/ Resources
Vowel CCV syllable practice sheet 14 one-syllable picture cards sortable by vowel, difficulty, position, and phonological process 17 sets of minimal pairs pivot phrase worksheet 3 homework sheets story booklet 14 simple speech puzzles	Vowel CCV syllable practice sheet 14 one-syllable picture cards sortable by vowel, difficulty, position, and phonological process 9 sets of minimal pairs pivot phrase worksheet 3 homework sheets story booklet 28 speech dominos

Initial /sm/ Resources	Initial /sn/ Resources
Vowel CCV syllable practice sheet 14 one-syllable picture cards sortable by vowel, difficulty, position, and phonological process 9 sets of minimal pairs pivot phrase worksheet 3 homework sheets story booklet Speech Race Game	Vowel CCV syllable practice sheet 14 one-syllable picture cards sortable by vowel, difficulty, position, and phonological process 13 sets of minimal pairs pivot phrase worksheet 3 homework sheets story booklet Speech Train Activity

Initial /sp/ Resources	Initial /st/ Resources
Vowel CCV syllable practice sheet 26 one-syllable picture cards sortable by vowel, difficulty, position, and phonological process 18 sets of minimal pairs pivot phrase worksheet 3 homework sheets story booklet Speech Fishing Activity	Vowel CCV syllable practice sheet 29 one-syllable picture cards sortable by vowel, difficulty, position, and phonological process 18 sets of minimal pairs pivot phrase worksheet 3 homework sheets story booklet I Spy With My Little Eye Speech Activity

Initial /sw/ Resources	Mixed /s/-Blends Resources
Vowel CCV syllable practice sheet 14 one-syllable picture cards sortable by vowel, difficulty, position, and phonological process 13 sets of minimal pairs pivot phrase worksheet 3 homework sheets story booklet Speech Maze Activity	14 /s/-Blend Scene cards with multiple /s/-blends per scene 18 sets of minimal pairs pivot phrase worksheet 3 homework sheets story booklet Speech Sort Activity

Additional Resources Included:

Games and Activity Suggestions
Sample Therapy Sequence from Isolation to Generalization
Overview of Speech Disorders
Word Lists and Gestural Prompt
Consonant and Vowel Charts
Modifiable Therapy Variables Chart
Multisensory Cues Chart
Glossary of Terms

Sample Pages

/s/-blends $21.95

Check out additional resources in the store!
Automatic discounts of 20-30% apply when buying 2 or more sets.

Speech Therapy Kit: S Card Sets and Resources

/s/ $15.95

Check out additional resources in the store!
Automatic discounts of 20-30% apply when buying 2 or more sets.

Need to teach a child to make an S?

Motor-Speech Articulation Method:
/s/ Card Sets and Resources

This comprehensive eResource has been designed from the ground up to take a motor-speech approach to speech therapy. Target words are simple in syllable shape and avoid consonant blends and vocalic /r/ sounds. They are sortable by increasing difficulty of phonemic complexity. Begin with the easiest cards and work your way up to harder ones. Every set includes phonemic variety in order to practice with different coarticulation effects and maximize carryover and generalization.

All therapy cards are illustrated in color. The resource is written to be accessible to both speech therapists and parents working with children at home. This eResource is ideal for targeting /s/ production when working with children with Childhood Apraxia of Speech, Phonological Disorders, Simple Articulation Disorders, Hearing-Impairment, and any other population that needs work to remediate speech.

Printable Resources Included:

Initial /s/ Resources	Final /s/ Resources
Vowel CV syllable practice sheet 44 one-syllable picture cards sortable by vowel, difficulty, position, and phonological process 18 sets of minimal pairs 3 pivot phrase worksheets 3 homework sheets 2 story booklets 15 simple speech puzzles	Vowel VC syllable practice sheet 44 one-syllable picture cards sortable by vowel, difficulty, position, and phonological process 18 sets of minimal pairs 2 pivot phrase worksheets 3 homework sheets 2 story booklets 28 speech dominos

Medial /s/ Resources	/s/-Scenes Resources
29 two-syllable picture cards sortable by difficulty, position, and phonological process 9 sets of minimal pairs 2 pivot phrase worksheets 3 homework sheets 1 story booklet Speech Race Game	29 picture cards with multiple /s/ words per scene 1 story booklet Speech-Sort Activity

Additional Resources Included:

Games and Activity Suggestions
Sample Therapy Sequence from Isolation to Generalization
Overview of Speech Disorders
Word Lists and Gestural Prompt
Consonant and Vowel Charts
Modifiable Therapy Variables Chart
Multisensory Cues Chart
Glossary of Terms

Sample Pages

/s/ $15.95

Check out additional resources in the store!
Automatic discounts of 20-30% apply when buying 2 or more sets.

Testy Shop is Now Open!

The Testy Shop is now open. I'm selling comprehensive, downloadable speech therapy kits. The first two kits available are /s/ Card Sets and Resources and /s/-Blends Card Sets and Resources. If you buy both you'll get an automatic 20% discount. The kits include expanded card sets with additional features (compared to the free sets) and have vowel worksheets, pivot phrase worksheets, illustrated minimal pairs, three levels of homework sheets, printable worksheets and activities and more. Please check out the store and let me know what you think!

Mini Review: Reading Raven

Reading Raven: A Mini-Review

I purchased Reading Raven for my children and we all love it. It is reasonably priced at $3.99.

This app does a great job at teaching early reading and writing from a phonics perspective. The game is divided into five lessons each with its own theme. The games within each lesson are similar, but changing the theme freshens them up considerably as the child levels up. The mini-games within each lesson teach letter-sound correspondences, sight words, sounding out words, spelling, and even writing. Sections of the game allow children to record their own voice reading and then compare the word they read to the one the narrator reads to see if they get it right. Other sections help them trace individual letters in a word and then the program shows them the completed word in their own handwriting. Every few mini-games they earn a sticker that they use to decorate Reading Raven's treehouse and my son enjoys that as well.

I feel it was a $3.99 very well spent.

Saturday, September 29, 2012

Passports

Our family will be going on our first real vacation later this year. We travel regularly to visit family, but that isn't quite the same thing as a vacation to an exotic locale. This vacation will be particularly special because it will involve extended family. My parents are going, several aunts are going, and a good family friend is going as well. I'm am looking forward to it more than I can say given that I will be traveling with a three and (by then) five year old.

Now, to take this trip, it is advised that we have passports. It is not, strictly speaking, necessary - but it is advised. I'd rather not have to drag several personal documents for four different people along, so we decided to go with the passport option.

As it turns out, the application is the least of the hassle. You have to locate and gather birth certificates, copies of the fronts and backs of drivers licences, marriage licences, and more. You have to drag all of those things to a place that processes passport applications and pay them an exorbitant amount of money.

And then, as icing on the cake, you have to persuade your preschool age children to sit for passport photos. If you can't get that photo, all the rest of the preparation is useless!! Michael's behavior was fine. It was the fact that the very patient lady had to take five pictures before he would keep his shoulders down and not smile so broadly that his eyes squinched up that was frustrating. Apparently hunched shoulders and squinty eyes are passport picture no-nos.

Ava on the other hand was in a mood. She behaved beautifully for her first picture. Unfortunately that one was discarded for squinty-eye syndrome. Several minutes of pleading got a second attempt which was discarded due to hunched shoulders. No matter how hard I tried I couldn't get the sulking child to look at the camera for a third attempt. The passport lady chose the hunchy shoulders as the picture least likely to get rejected by the all powerful ones at the passport office and we just had to go with that. Lovely.

As a bonus for the wildly successful outing, my passport picture (mine needed to be renewed) looks a lot like those arrest pictures they always show of criminals in news articles. Isn't that great?

Friday, September 28, 2012

The Weekly Review: Week 79

SLP Resource of the Week

Organizing materials is a huge pain. I think Jackie at Teal and Lime has come up with a perfect, compact way of organizing card decks. She uses index card holders in a tray. Click on the link and take a look. It is adorable. If you're using full-size, commercial decks, you'd fit one deck per index card holder. If you're using my free decks, you could probably fit all the decks that go with a particular phoneme in a single index card container. I would probably take the step of labeling the top of each index card holder with the phoneme of the cards inside so I could grab the one I want in an instant.

Ava this Week

I believe I've already mentioned pneumonia 2.0. What impressed me most about my little girl this week is how she just doesn't let much get her down. Even through five straight days of 102.5ish fever she still woke up at her usual time, played (in a low-key manner), and was relatively cheerful. She was handling it so well we didn't even give her a fever reducer most of the time. I need to keep her fortitude in mind the next time I'm trying to decide if she's "sick enough" to make a pediatrician appointment.

Weekly Michael

Michael: "Mama, there's a girl at school and Guess What?!?, she wants to marry me."
Me (thinking-not saying): You've got to be kidding me! It's preschool!
Me: "That's nice sweetheart. Maybe when you're grown up. What's her name?"
Michael: "I don't know."

Weekly Weight Loss

This week I'm down 3.2 pounds. That's exactly the same as last week. Everyone's got a unique set of genetic, dietary, medical history, exercise patterns, etc, but here's the evidence for me. I used a strict calorie-in/calorie-out method of dieting for 11 weeks and lost 9.5 pounds (0.86/week). Then I eliminated carbs from my diet. I eat as much as I'm hungry for, as long as it isn't carbs. (Ok, there are a few here and there in veggies, but not much.) I've been eating low carbs for 2.5 weeks and I've lost 7.9 pounds (3.16/week). That's a pretty dramatic difference. For whatever reason, drastically reducing carbs in my diet works really well for me.

Weekly All Consuming Obsession

I have been working every spare minute on getting the books ready for opening the store next week. My mother generously offered to watch the kids ~~a little bit~~ a lot of extra time and my husband is helping out with ~~some of~~ a lot of the technical coding. The pieces are coming together. My proofreaders were amazing. It looks like the store will go up sometime next week and will have two books available at opening: /s/ and /s/-Blends. Once I take a break, I'll be working on adding more books regularly. (One a month or perhaps one every two months? These things take a lot of time to put together.)

Thursday, September 27, 2012

Pneumonia is Contagious? Imagine that.

As you may remember, Michael walked around for a couple of weeks with a cough. He never ran a fever or had a runny nose, so I figured he has some sort of mild cold that would work itself out. Eventually it got to the point that he couldn't play because every time he tried to run he'd start coughing uncontrollably. After two weeks of a cough I decided a visit to the pediatrician was in order. Diagnosis: Walking Pneumonia.

A week or two later (last Friday), Ava started running a 102 something fever. Her appetite was non-existent and she was a little more tired than usual, but there were no other obvious signs of illness. Michael hadn't been showing symptoms for well over a week, so I thought it was more likely that Ava had picked something up at school than that she'd come down with his pneumonia. I decided to wait it out assuming it was a cold or virus. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday passed in a very similar manner with fever, fatigue, and lack of appetite. Monday a cough began to creep into the mix.

I looked up fever in the pediatrician office's handy manual Monday night and it said to call for an appointment if a fever lasted more than three days with no obvious source. Oops. So, I finally called Tuesday (Day 5). Bottom line: pneumonia. Lovely.

The silver lining to this mess is that they prescribed Ava the same super-effective on this particular bug antibiotic they gave Michael. 24 hours later and she's already much better.

Hindsight is always 20-20.

As a side note, Ava is a serious trooper. The times in my life that I've run a high fever I'm completely wiped out and pitiful. Ava pretty much went about her daily activities in a relatively cheery manner. She didn't want to eat and was a little more sensitive than usual, but other than that she was fine. The pediatrician commented on how cheery she was. It reminds me of the time when she was a baby and we took her in for something (I don't remember what) only to find she had a double ear infection. We never would have known. The child is amazing.

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Great Source of Free Speech and Language Worksheets

Heather's Speech Therapy has an amazing list of free speech and language worksheets to download. She has syllable wheels, most consonants in multiple positions in words and phrases, grammar and vocabulary worksheets, and some reward charts. All worksheets include color pictures of the target words. Most target words are 1-2 syllables and vary from simple syllable shapes and phonemes to complex ones. You should definitely check these out!

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Initial Y: Free Speech Therapy Articulation Picture Cards

If you like this free card set, you might want to check out the premium speech therapy kits now available in the Testy Shop. Kits include expanded card sets, illustrated minimal pairs, homework sheets and more in a single download.

Initial /j/ Card Set

(/j/ is the phonetic symbol for the sound typically spelled with the letter "Y".)

To download click on the image to open it full size. Then right click on the image, choose "save as" and save the page to your computer.

I recommend you print on cardstock and laminate for durability.

Description

This articulation picture card set is designed to be more comprehensive than the typical sets you might find elsewhere. The target audience for this set is young children or children with more severe speech delays that need intensive practice with initial /j/ at a one-syllable level. No blends or vocalic /r/ sounds are included in this set. The set pairs the initial /j/ with as many different vowel sounds as possible to maximize co-articulation variety.

Key Features

This set includes 12 therapy cards with the target word and picture on the front, and the difficulty level and a carrier phrase on the back.
The words are all CV or CVC in syllable shape.
The words are easily understood by or easily taught to young children.
Combines the target sound with a variety of vowel sounds.
Words are sorted by difficulty level for an easy progression from easy to hard.

Permissions

I give permission to copy, print, or distribute this card set provided that:

Each copy makes clear that I am the document's author.
No copies are altered without my express consent.
No one makes a profit from these copies.
Electronic copies contain a live link back to my original and print copies not for merely personal use contain the URL of my original.

Looking for Feedback

I would love to hear back from anyone who uses this card set. Let me know if you find errors or there is anything you would change. Comment on this page, or send me an email at testyyettrying(at)gmail(dot)com.

Where can I find more?

More sets are on my Free Speech Therapy Articulation Cards page. Other card sets include /p, b, t, d, m, n, h, f, v, k, g, w, j, s, z, l, th, ch, sh, s-blends, and l-blends/ and more sets are being added regularly.