Another Simple DIY Speech Warm-up Teachers Will Thank You For

Here's another perfect blend of phonics and speech that is a great activity for working on final consonants and word families at the same time. (See the last one here.) This will only take you 5-10 minutes to make from materials you'll already have around.

Gather

1 piece of cardstock or construction paper
1 piece of regular copy/printer paper
marker or sharpie
stapler
craft tape (optional)

Assemble

Quarter-fold the cardstock and paper and cut into fourths. Decide if you want your mini flipbook to have six or eight pages. If you want six pages, put three pieces of paper on top of one piece of cardstock. If you want eight pages, put four pieces of paper on top of one piece of cardstock. Then fold that pile in half and put three staples in the fold line to hold it together. If you like, put a piece of craft tape over the outer fold to cover the staples and make your mini flipbook look "bound". Next, cut the inner pages once so that the right half is 2/3 of the book's length and the left half is 1/3 of the book's length.

Now you have a blank flipbook to fill out. Choose 6-8 word families that have your target sound as their final sound. For final /k/ I used: -ack, -ake, -ick, -ock, -oke, and -uck. Write these on the right-hand pages of your flipbook. Then write 6-8 beginning consonant sounds on the left-hand pages of your flipbook. I chose six early emerging sounds to keep the focus on the more difficult, targeted, final sound. My six initial consonants were: /p, b, t, d, m, n/. As you use the flipbook, some combinations will make real words and others will make nonsense words. That is fine. Now write your target sound on the cover and you're ready to go.

Inspiration found here. Follow the link for 10 different games to play with phonics flipbooks.

Speech Card Set Activity: Initial F - I Have Who Has

I Have, Who Has? is a great game for speech practice. It is a quick-paced, cooperative game that keeps all students engaged, paying attention, and producing target words in a carrier phrase all at the same time.

Preparation

Print this I Have, Who Has? card deck.
If you need another target sound, make one of your own using one of my card sets (free, premium) printed two sheets to a page (to make them smaller). Then cut out the pictures of your choice and glue them onto handwritten I have, who has cards made from construction paper or cardstock.

How to play.

Distribute the cards as evenly as possible to the students. If you're doing individual therapy, divide them between yourself and the student and your productions will serve as models. The person who has the start card begins and asks, "Who has fan?" The person with the other fan card will say, "I have fan, who has phone?" Play continues in this manner until the group reaches the end. To make things easier, have the children turn over each card as it is "played". This will reduce the number of cards left that they have to keep track of.

Advantages

• It is a fun, engaging cooperative game.
• Each child practices saying two target words per turn in a carrier phrase.
• It is a good game for practicing attention skills.
• It has great re-play value.

Word List

• fan
• phone
• fun
• food
• foot
• foam
• fight
• feed
• fin
• five
• feet
• fetch
• fuss
• full

A Concrete Demonstration of "Self Control" for Kids

This activity comes from Dustin Smith - the Teacher Tipster. All you need is a bottle of bubbles. If you want to get fancy, download the free "Self-Control Bubbles" label one teacher made and paste it onto the bottle.

Self-control is a really abstract concept for young children. Research shows that self-control isn't something you're just born with. It is a skill that needs to be practiced and can be improved. Start the activity by filling your room with bubbles and encouraging your children to pop them. Let them get a little out of control. Once all the bubbles have been popped and the excitement calms down, issue a challenge. Tell them you're going to fill the room with bubbles again. This time, their job is to NOT pop the bubbles. Don't pop them if they land on your desk. Don't pop them if they land in your hair. Don't even pop them if they land on your nose. Once all the bubbles have popped, talk about how hard it was to leave those bubbles alone. Tell them it takes self-control to not do something you really want to do. Discuss other times in a classroom that it is important to exercise self-control.

The best thing about this activity is that it should be memorable. The concept of self-control will come up again and again and you can refer back to the self-control bubbles to help them remember one very concrete example of when they succeeded. You might even repeat the experiment regularly to give extra practice and help keep the idea fresh in their mind.

If you're creative, you can think of other exercises in self-control and do one a month. You might put a pretzel on everyone's desk. Anyone who hasn't touched the pretzel by the end of the lesson gets two more. Simon Says, The Freeze Dance, and Red Light, Green Light are games that exercise self-control.

If you have any great activities for working on self-control, please share them in the comments!