To help kids learn how to read, they need to be able to identify sounds. A beginning step to teaching reading is working on identifying the first sound in a word. The kindergarteners are given a word such as "sun" and need to be able to say the first sound is "s" as quick as possible! The kids compete with each other by saying as many correct first sounds as they can in a minute. |
There are a lot of words in English that mean different things but sound or are spelled the same. "Rock" can mean a type of music or a large stone. "Blue" is a color but "blew" is an action word. Some of our students work on defining these words and using them in sentences. Last week, we worked on some words and wrote them on turkey feathers. Brianna and the other students were then able to color the turkeys after working hard!
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Last week, some of our speech students played a game where they tried to spell "turkey" while working hard. Khalil and Romelio are always trying their best to produce the best speech sounds they can so they can speak clearly! The boys were able to pick a letter from the bucket after repeating their word in a sentence to help them practice their sounds.
In the speech room with Tyler, it was time to get out a reinforcing football game and expand his expressive language. Tyler was instructed to look at a picture with two images, and describe the two images. Then, he had to explain how the objects were alike and different. The speech teacher competed with Tyler at the football game; every time Tyler was being quiet and did not provide an answer, the speech teacher got to take a turn! Tyler was motivated to speak as much as he could so that he could win the game, and he did! Princess has now been using the EET program by Sara Smith for many consecutive weeks, and she is quick to describe objects while referring to each bead! We started the session with a riddle game where Princess and Chris took turns thinking of an object and describing it. Afterward, Princess worked with the speech teacher to give more detailed descriptions. It was a fun and highly verbal 20 minutes! Chris is instructed to twist his fingers and make strong 'r' sounds as many times as he can! He is able to make up silly sentences as long as he lifts his tongue, pulls it in, and says 'rrrrrr' in the targeted word! Gavyn was excited to go hunting for treasure! He got to choose treasure cards from a treasure chest every time he was able to give two definitions for a multiple-meaning word and use it in a sentence. With his cards, he was able to win the treasure piece inside, and by the end of the session he won almost all of the treasure!! Practice makes perfect, and the same goes for reading. Mathias, David, Wyatt, and Erica all worked extremely hard at reading non-words as quick as they could! After each practice, they graphed and colored their results; the goal is for the orange to get to the orange line and the green to get to the green line. They are impriving with each round, let's keep it up! Also, they are now reading more challenging material with complex and long words. Great work today! Teamwork is incredibly beneficial for both learning... and speech sounds! Khalil and Romello were put together to work on their 'th' sounds; they needed to make up sentences and remind each other to 'stick out your tongue'. Kandace and Tony were also placed together and worked on their long 's' sounds. Each group collected treasure together. Helping your friend speak better can help you too! Kaedyn was given pictures of common objects (tree, shoes, car, etc.), and Antonio was provided with 'verb' dice to help him tell stories and use his target sounds! Antonio was instructed to roll three dice, look at the pictures, and create a few sentences about the images. These Rory Story Cube dice are perfect to use as conversation starters and story telling. Kaedyn used the visual prompts from the EET program to help her describe items. Additionally, to help with her comparing and contrasting objective, the therapist explained how words such as 'and' and 'both' describe similar items, and 'but', 'however', and 'while' describe different items. To explain the difference between 'small', 'medium' and 'large', a graphic was drawn to explain that medium is 'about your size', while small is something you can smaller than you hold and big is something that is much bigger than you!
Who can collect the most cards without losing them to the rain? Today we raced to see who could correctly say the first sound in each word. To make the activity extra challenging, words with initial blends ('blue', 'bridge') were chosen. Brennen, Matthew, Catherine, and Zack were all able to say the first sound without hesitation! Then, each child was asked to name the first letter in each of their words and label the sound each letter makes. Just a reminder that we have parent-teacher conferences tonight Thursday November 8th and next Wednesday November 14th. Conference nights are from 3-7 pm and you should already have a scheduled time with your classroom teacher. I will be bouncing around to many confer
Everyone was given a popcorn bucket full of capital and lower-case letters. The rule of the game was 'name that letter' as fast as possible! After naming letters, everyone practiced listening to words with blends ('brick', 'please') in the initial position, and then naming the very first sound ('b', 'p'). It was challenging at first, but after those first tries everyone was quickly repeating just the first sound. It was a successful and fun day!
Today we worked on our 'th' and 'sh' sounds while collecting cars from the movie Cars. Everyone tried to win the most matches, and they each got to choose a card after correctly saying their word and putting it into a sentence. Romello was reminded to stick out his tongue, and Khalil, Tony, and Kandace worked together to make a 'fat' ('sh') sound instead of a 'skinny' ('s') sound. Great teamwork!
We work on answering 'wh' questions like "who, what, when, where, why" in the speech classroom. We have a flipbook that has pictures and a sentence to help the kids answer the questions. They love flipping through and creating funny sentences. Another activity is creating pictures on the iPad and asking 'wh' questions about the scenes the children create. These scenes can also be used to ask only "where" questions for kids working on prepositions like "behind, above, on, in."
Sometimes we work on using smooth, slow speech in the classroom. There are lots of fun games we can play to practice. When using a board game, the children can take a turn after saying a word or phrase while stretching out their speech or using soft starts in the beginning of words. Other times, we can look at pictures of fun things like insects and talk about them practicing our smooth speech! |
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