Tuesday's Treasure Box: My Gingerbread House

This was my gingerbread house for several years of "after Thanksgiving lessons." 

Yes, it's tacky, but students in the early childhood classes loved it.

Simply add a door and windows to a folding display board, add Velcro strips, and invest in some dollar store holiday items. Many of my items were cast-offs. 

Pair with a book about a gingerbread house and teach the adjectives big, little, noisy, rough or bumpy, smooth, hard, and soft. Students chose a holiday decoration, used one or more adjectives to describe it, and then placed it on the board and told its location (next to Santa, over the window, etc). 

Introduce the adjectives by presenting objects (rock, cotton, sandpaper, and bells) with pictures. 

Enjoy!

Diana

© 2013

Tuesday's Treasure Box: 29 Free Forms and On-line Literacy Activities

I am posting two treasures today and know that you will love them!

Ricki Block, at Preschool Speechie, offers 29 free printable forms include language sample and MLU checklists, pacing boards, a homework note form, a question hierarchy, information about feeding and first words, games, activities, and so much more. Many forms are perfect to share with early childhood teachers and parents. Others can be used daily in therapy. Did I mention that that they were FREE? 

AND, she is currently offering, free for a limited time,  141 VC-CVC picture cards at her TpT Store. 

Literactive provides FREE on-line literacy materials for early readers. Most items are available for download, but you must be registered prior to downloading. 

Read along with animated nursery rhymes, poems, and guided reading books. Under Activities,  some target skills are rhyming, telling differences, matching sounds, and building simple sentences.  Look at Level 7 for activities targeting s, r, or l blends. 

Enjoy!

Diana

© 2013

Pizza!

My early childhood classes usually had some lessons related to food and household items during November. Pizza was one topic that I often used as I really like the book, Hi, Pizza Man!, by Virginia Walter. Much language was elicited as the students used props to retell the story. 

Retell the story, Hi Pizza Man!, while using ideas from Flannel Friday: Hi, Pizza Man! found at 1234 More Storytimes' blog. 

Get some props; a telephone, toy or paper pizzas, and a hat for the pizza man.  Tell the students to call the pizza man to request a pizza. They can request sizes, toppings, etc. The group creates the pizza and the pizza man delivers. 

There are a lot of great pizza related activities online. And, many literature selections suitable for the pizza theme.

 

I like the FREE app,  Making Pizza - LAZ Reader [Level E–first grade] by Language Technologies, Inc. The pictures are wonderful and the book provides a lot of opportunities to talk about actions and ask questions. 

NYC Department of Education has an adapted PowerPoint Book, I Love Pizza, as well as, printable books made with Widget Symbols.

Find more than 25 FREE pizza themed books at Tar Heel Reader.org.

Activities to go with the book, The Little Red Hen Makes a Pizza, by Philemon Sturges and Amy Walrod can be found at Make Learning Fun.com. You will also find an emergent reader and pizza sequence cards.  

More sequence cards, How to Make Pizza, can be found at Kizclub.com.

Sing pizza songs to teach imitation of gestures, vocabulary, sentence structure, following directions and phonemic awareness. Find three cute songs at Storytime Katie. 

Request and answer questions while putting toppings on a pizza slice from Making Friends.com

At Boardmaker Achieve there are over 50 printable or interactive Boardmaker activities. Find recipes, storyboards for popular children's literature, sequence cards, a pizza restaurant choice board, and several good interactive pizza activities for your whiteboard. 

For those of you who like to cook, check out Play With Your Food: Pizza Fun Faces at Early Activities and Projects. Find more recipes at Preschool Express. 

Watch Sesame Street's Fat Blue orders from Speedy Pizza. Talking about this would be a good question and answer activity with some phonemic awareness and inferences thrown in! 

Video clips emphasizing the word pizza can be seen at Sesame Street.org. Use these for print awareness, phonemic awareness, and the phoneme /p/. Look for Ordering a Pizza, Pizza, and P: Pizza. 

Another phonemic awareness activity, Word World's Pigs Perfect Pizza, can be found at PBS Kids.org. 

Make pizza at Emily's Pizza Parlor by Inkless Tales.

Over 150 pizza activities at Teachers Pay Teachers are FREE. Pizza Scramble- A free Auditory Processing, Sequencing, and Memory Activity and It's a PIZZA were created by SLPs and cover sequencing, following directions, recalling sentences and more. 

Diana

© 2013

Tuesday's Treasure Box: Thanksgiving Matching Game, A FREE App

Thanksgiving 
Matching Game

Good Neighbor Press, Inc

Although Thanksgiving Matching Game was developed to reinforce visual discrimination skills, this would also be a great app for speech and language. As students tell about the differences, a variety of speech and language skill objectives can be targeted. 

Enjoy!

Diana

© 2013

Hey Diddle Diddle - What's in the Middle?

Hey Diddle Diddle - What's in the Middle? was a favorite of my students. The words are fun to say. Just squeeze a dog, cat, and cow together and ask the students to respond to the question Hey Diddle Diddle, what's in the middle? They answer the question, pull the animal out of the middle, and repeat and/or reverse roles. 

There is a lot that you can do with the rhyme, Hey Diddle Diddle. My students pretended to be the characters in the story and used the action words jumping, running, playing, and laughing. Retelling, rhyming words, the phoneme /d/, and the concepts over and under are just a few of more of the skills that can be practiced. 

See the animated rhyme and play the games at Literactive and Inkless Tales. Also, look at the animated rhymes at Kids-Songs.TV (YouTube) and Playrific. 

There are a lot of good ideas and an emergent reader for this rhyme at Virtual Vine. 

Find story props at Kizclub.

Check out the way that Karen Cox, of PreKinders, uses her printable Hey Diddle Diddle Cards in her classroom. 

At DLTK, find crafts, word wall pictures, and an Itsy Bitsy Hey Diddle Diddle Book. 

Carl's Corner has printable books, a sequencing activity, a matching game, and a story cube. 

This pdf from the Charles A. Dana Center at The University of Texas at Austin, tells how to use the rhyme, Hey Diddle Diddle, to teach kindergarten students differences between nonliving objects and living organisms. 

I found an interactive book and some printables at Boardmaker Achieve. 

As of today, there were 146 Hey Diddle Diddle activities and posters found at Teachers pay Teachers. Six were free. 

Enjoy!

Diana

© 2013

Tuesday's Treasure Box: Between the Lions

Discover a wealth of resources at Between the Lions on PBS Kids. Games, stories, video clips, lesson ideas, and so much more. 

Look at Find It!, the index that sorts the activities by skill, subject, and curriculum.

Practice describing, talk about feelings, expand vocabulary, make sentences, and play phonological awareness games.

The video clips of songs such as Hung up on H, Get Your Mouth Moving, and Sloppy Pop can be used when teaching phonological awareness.

  

Play Synonym Sam's Lab, Hopposites, and sort categories while playing The Messy Attic.

Print a word wall and a variety of matching games.

My favorite part of the site is the Stories page where you will find animated Folktales and Fables such as Three More Little Pigs, Stone Soup, and The Little Red Hen. 

Enjoy!

Diana

© 2013

Talking About Food and Thanksgiving

If you are talking about food and Thanksgiving this month, take a look at my posts from November 2012 for free down loads and a lot of links!

It's Almost Thanksgiving Day and the Old Woman Swallowed the Pie! Great Links for Thanksgiving.

 Finding Mr. Turkey - A Spatial Concept Activity

Turkey Surprise - Spatial Concepts and More for Your Therapy Session

I Am Hungry . . . for Thanksgiving Dinner

Playing with Food

Playing With Food . . . on Your iPad

Playing With Food . . . on Your Computer

Who is Eating? - Teach pronouns and more with this free download.

Diana

© 2013