The Weekly Review: Week 82

SLP Resource of the Week

I saw another activity that would be great for working on sounds in isolation and as a bonus, practices letter recognition as well at the Tons of Fun blog. On her printables page you can download letter paths which are simply a grid of letters where the target letter works its way from a starting point to an ending point like a maze. You give the child a bingo marker, stamp, or stickers and they practice the target sound each time they take a step along the "path".

Ava this Week

Ava knows things I don't even know that she knows. She and her brother like to play together and so if he is playing a game she wants to play too. I have educational games installed on our phones and computers and Michael is playing them regularly. Ava is jumping right in and doing a pretty great job of keeping up. She's doing basic addition problems and learning her letter-sound correspondences. If she's not quite ready to go to bed at night I'll find her in the morning surrounded by books in her bed. There's nothing quite like the sight of your child sleeping in bed surrounded by books. It melts a mama/slp/educator's heart.

Weekly Michael

I grabbed a little map skills workbook from Scholastic when it was on sale for $4.99 to add a little variety to our homeschooling. Michael's eyes lit up when he saw it. It was a bright colorful book of his own that he was going to get to write in! The very first activity was looking at a map of Buddy Bear's bedroom and answering some questions about it and then drawing a map of his own bedroom. He did a great job and even wanted me to label all the things he drew just like the items on the other map were labeled. I was pleased with our first activity in map skills and he was excited and I thought that was the end of it.

Later that day, after I finished putting Ava down for nap, I went in to check on Michael in his room. He explained, "I just moved you from Ava's room to my room." I brilliantly responded, "Huh?" Then he showed me the "map" he had made of our house with various small toys representing people and pets in various rooms. When he heard me opening his door, he took the small toy representing me and moved it from the space on his map that was Ava's room to the space on his map that was his room. That boy never fails to amaze me.

Weekly Weight Loss

And one week later I'm down another 2.8 pounds. That's much better than the two-week stall that preceded this week. At this point I'm down 20-25 in the four months or so we've been dieting. I'm hoping to go another 10 before switching from weight-loss mode to figuring out a reasonable maintenance plan.

Weekly Speech Resource Kit Update

The /k/ kit is well under way. The initial section is complete and has a vowel worksheet, 44 illustrated one-syllable therapy cards, 18 sets of minimal pairs, three pivot phrase worksheets, 3 homework sheets, two story booklets, and a speech-switcheroo game to print out and use.

The final section is complete and has a vowel worksheet, 59 illustrated one-syllable therapy cards, 18 sets of minimal pairs, 3 pivot phrase worksheets, 3 homework sheets, 2 story booklets, and a speech caterpillar printable activity.

The medial /k/ section is also finished and has 44 illustrated two-syllable therapy cards, 9 minimal pairs, 3 pivot phrase worksheets, 3 homework sheets, 2 story booklets, and a Speech Match printable activity.

The mixed section, introduction, and appendix are still in progress.

Weekly Communication Fail

I had a customer contact me for help downloading the speech kits she had purchased. (Thank you again, to everyone who is buying the speech kits.) One thing I did to assist her is resend the email with the download link. When I emailed her to let her know she should look for it I said, "I resent that email..."

Somehow, not once in my life, did it occur to me that resent (I sent that again) and resent (take offense) are spelled in exactly the same way. She thought that I was telling her I was offended that she had emailed me with a question. I felt terrible! Nothing could be further from the truth. I immediately sent her a very apologetic email trying to clear up the completely unintended confusion. I hope she received my apology. I was actually quite happy to help. And so, from now on I will always hyphenate. "I re-sent that email." Hmm. Perhaps I'll just rephrase that entirely so there is no chance of ambiguity at all.

Speech and Language Roundup: List 1

Occasionally I come across activities on the web that I think would be great in a speech and language room, but they really aren't full-post material. Whenever I put together five such resources I'll share them with you in a "roundup".

1. I found a post that has a great worksheet on homophones. Each pair of homophones is illustrated and used in a sentence example. The worksheet has 20 pairs of homophones. The full post gives some additional homophone resources.
   


2. This youtube video has a series of adorable, catchy songs - one for each letter of the alphabet. Find the sound you're working on and show the video to the kids for a musical video introduction to your speech sound.
   


3. Susie Q at Learning with Susie Q has an I Have...Who Has? free printable game for irregular plural nouns that is exceptional. The full (free) game has 23 irregular plural nouns.
   
   


4. Smile Play Learn has a very sweet graphic/Simon Says activity based on the book Kitten's First Full Moon by Kevin Henkes. The book has an engaging story with exquisite black and white illustrations. This activity is perfect if you're working on action words with a language group. The post also has an art activity for making a soft kitty.
   
   


5. Digitprop has a set of super cute downloadable .pdf files. Cut them out, fold and tape and you end up with 3-D letters. They would look nice on a desk or bulletin board, or simply as an activity to get kids excited about their target sound.
   
   

Speech Therapy At Home: A Minimalist Approach

I've experimented with several approaches to home therapy. We've done 30 minutes sessions five times a week in addition to the therapy services Ava was receiving elsewhere. That was intense and a schedule that was hard to maintain even when the children were only in daycare two mornings a week.

We tried doing a 15-20 minute therapy session nightly after dinner. That was working well at least 3 days a week until summertime hit and our schedule was less regular. Then sessions dropped to once a week and then we got distracted all together.

When fall approached, Ava was switching from daycare two mornings a week to preschool five mornings a week. She was also starting her speech group again twice a week for 45 minutes after the summer break. I decided to postpone home sessions until we settled into our school-year schedule.

Things are finally calming down. Ava has transitioned well to preschool. She's doing fine in her speech group twice a week. Her speech group is wonderful. They have a group for preschool-aged speech-only children. The therapists use a cycles approach working on each sound for a week or two before moving on to another sound. After moving through all the targeted sounds they begin the cycle again. Ava has a somewhat unique spectrum of speech sounds she has vs. has not acquired though. She has (with the exception of /sk/) pretty much mastered the /s/-blends. /s/-blends are typically a sound most preschool children need to address, so the group spends quite a few consecutive sessions on /s/-blends Ava already knows. Therefore, I am feeling the need to supplement at home again.

I don't want to overwhelm her though. Already her schedule is at least three times as busy as it has ever been. So I'm taking a minimalist approach to home therapy right now. I've taken a card deck upstairs to her bedroom. Usually we do final /k/, but right now her speech group is working on /sk/ so I'm switching to /sk/ this week (extensive /s/-blend sets are currently available in the Testy Shop).

I keep the deck on her bedside table and we practice the deck before nap and again before bed. It takes no more than 5-7 minutes to do a speed drill consisting of at least 50 productions. I can tell she's fatiguing near the end of the 59 card final /k/ deck (coming soon in the Testy Shop) because she's at 90% accuracy for the first 20 and down to more like 30% accuracy by the final 20).

I like this approach. It meets the two essential criteria for getting it done in our house.

• It is quick.
• It is built into our routines (before bed and nap) in a hard to forget way.
• As a bonus, it is heavily focused on child productions which is essential for progress with motor-speech problems.