30+ Free Wintry Resources for Speech and Language Therapy

We haven't seen a bit of snow in my part of Virginia this year. This is a peek of my neighbors' snowmen taken in 2011. 

My most popular posts in 2013 were my lists of links so here are more than 30 links to resources for winter.

If you are looking for something to do on those first few days back, check out these New Year's Day activities. 

• Fun Facts for New Year's Day (aka I Mustache You to Recall Details for New Year's Day) is a FREE packet, made by The Thrifty SLP, to get her older students back into the routine. 

• At Speaking of Speech.com find My New Year's Resolution for Speech; a great way to talk about current goals. 

• We're Thinking About A New Year is FREE at Ladybug's Teacher Files. Work on this together in a small group to incorporate predicting, time/seasonal concepts, complex wh-questions, retelling, and more. 

• Find New Year Speech Sound Fireworks at Word Nerd Speech Teach.

• Two of the newest posts at Speechie Freebies.com include activities for New Year's goals. I love the Christmas Survey - a great way for students to compose and ask questions. 

• Back to School (after Winter Break!), a story booklet is a nice first day back activity from Ms. Lane's SLP Materials. 

There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of links to activities suitable for speech and language therapy that incorporate a winter theme. Here are just a few. 

• The Snowy Day for Speech and Language Therapy, one of my prior posts, provides you with more than 18 links with ideas to use with The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats. 

• Find two FREE snow apps at another of my posts, Snow Day! - Apps and More. 

• Increase Utterance Length with Winter Bingo for Early Childhood is the last of my re-posts in this list. 

• Ruth Morgan at Chapel Hill Snippets has posted her more than Modest Collection of Winter Ideas. All are FREE and most are printable. 

• At Playing With Words 365.com find Snowflake Gross Motor Learning and Penguin Memory/Describing Cards. Both activities could be used with a variety of speech and language objectives. 

• Download Language at Home, take home activities for The Mitten by Jan Brett, All You Need for a Snowman by Alice Schertle, and The Jacket I Wear in the Snow by Shirley Neitzel.  All of these and more resources from Heard in Speech.  

• A lot of work, but very cute Winter Dramatic Play at L. C., SLP. Build a snowman, ice skate, make some hot chocolate. 

• There's a great Winter Vocabulary List at Sam's Blog. 

• Allison at Speech Peeps has a free Winter Language Writing Activity for her older students. 

• Find Winter /s/ Blend Practice from Tracy Boyd and other winter themed activities at Speaking of Speech.com.

• Make Learning Fun has a lot of activities that incorporate snow and winter. I really like The Hat Emergent Reader that can be used when reading The Hat by Jan Brett. 

• Printable graphics and activities for The Mitten, The Hat, and The Three Snow Bears by Jan Brett can be found at janbrett.com. 

• The First Grade Parade's Mitten Loads of Fun includes a very cute downloadable blend activity for students practicing /l/ blends.  She also created an adjective activity for beginning readers and an activity for making predictions. The math and writing activities could be used to ask questions and make comparisons. Use the Mitten Math word problems for articulation carry-over. 

• A search for "winter" at TpT revealed 95 free activities for speech therapy. Topics included inferences, pronouns, articulation, sequencing and so much more. 

• Print Make a Snowman Game at Activity Village. Students can practice saying their target phoneme the number of times on the die. Work as teams or individually. Change the rules to meet the needs of your students. 

• Visit Classroom Magic (scroll down) to see the Snowmen at Night graphic organizer. 

• Build a snowman and sing Ten Little Snowmen at Starfall.com.

• For unique homework activities, look at Fun Winter Speech and Language Activities for Kids to do at Home from The Speech Language Pathology in Motion Blog and 10 "Wintery" Games to Play Over Break to Build Speech, Language, and Listening Skills by Katie Yeh at Friendship Circle.org. 

Enjoy and stay warm!

Diana

© 2013

Books to Read in December AND Links!

Disclaimer: This post contains Amazon affiliate links.

During the holidays, add one or more of these wonderful books to your therapy sessions. 

If You Take a Mouse to the Movies by Laura Numeroff is my favorite holiday book. Find many links to activities in two of my 2012 posts, Taking the Mouse to the Movies and Taking Mouse to the Movies: Why Questions, Pronouns, and more. 

Read Llama Llama Holiday Drama, by Anna Dewdney, on your computer or whiteboard at We Give Books.org. This book gives you a lot of opportunities to talk about action words, work on verb tense, and ask and answer questions. At Teachers pay Teachers, Llama Llama Holiday Drama Activities Free! includes an adjective search and comprehension questions. Find vocabulary and other language activities in the Llama Llama Activity Kit from Penguin Young Readers Group.






Cookies are always a good topic for December. Kizclub has story props for the book, Who Stole the Cookies from the Cookie Jar?, illustrated by Jane Manning and you can view the version by Christine Schneider at Vimeo. Find a rhyming activity at Cinjoella and, at YouTube, Kim Taylor-DiLeva explains how to use the rhyme with a group of students along with adding some sign language. 

Find story props for Bear Stays Up at 1+1+1=1 and a free sequencing activity for readers at Teachers Pay Teachers (Happily Ever After Education).  

OR, for a little less than a Grande Caffe Latte, you can purchase Bear Stays Up For Christmas: Speech and Language Activities by Jenn Alcorn of Crazy Speech World. Included in the 18 pages are activities for rhyming, synonyms, comprehension questions, wh questions, story retelling, and articulation word lists for /r/, /s/, and /l/. 

The other book companion by an SLP at Teachers pay Teachers is only a little more than that Grande Caffe Latte.  The 37 page Bear Stays Up For Christmas – Speech and Language Activities (Book Companion) by Mindy Stenger of The Speech Bucket targets sequencing, story retelling, comprehension, basic language concepts, following directions, written expression, and more.

The Easy Reader at Heidisongs.com is perfect for retelling, sequencing, syntax or to increase sentence length after reading Pete the Cat Saves Christmas. Use Parent Magazine's Christmas Addition with Pete the Cat and The Christmas Pup as carrier phrases for articulation practice. Addition facts are perfect for the phoneme /s/ and for practicing /l/blends - Seven plus one equals nine. Use the blank sheet to write your own facts and incorporate other phonemes. 



Find preschool activity suggestions for Snowballs by Lois Ehlert at Wannabwestern. 

Gingerbread Baby by Jan Brett is another favorite. Find another book companion at TpT by Mindy Stenger of The Speech Bucket. And, this one is free. Twelve pages of activities target sequencing, story retelling, comprehension, basic language concepts, early print awareness, and oral and written expression. 


Create a Gingerbread Baby House at JanBrett.com. All kinds of opportunities for speech and language production can occur as students give directions while one student creates the house.  Make several different houses, print, and use for barrier games. Practice articulation carry-over, basic positional words, syntax, turn taking, and more! 

Listen to Jan Brett read her story. Print masks from Jan Brett's site and students can wear them as they retell the story. Or, use them as story props.

I hope that these book suggestions and links save you a little time as you plan your December sessions. I will be taking a break from blogging this month and will be back in January!

Best wishes to you during this holiday season! 

Diana

© 2013

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

Tuesday's Treasure Box: Inkless Tales

Elizabeth Bushey is the creator of all games, poems, stories, and much more at Inkless Tales. Her stories, poems, and tongue twisters are perfect for articulation practice. 

I like Hey Diddle, Diddle. Click on each character to talk about actions and more. 

Download finger puppets for the plays, Little Red Riding Hood and Goldilocks and the Three Bears. 

Annie's Ice Cream Shop and Emily's Pizza Parlor are great therapy activities. 

Enjoy!

Diana

© 2013

Tuesday's Treasure Box: Halloween Apps and Apptivities

There are many Halloween themed apps that can be used for a large number of speech and language objectives.  I don't need to tell you about them as many other SLPs have done a great job on their blogs. AND, a few even created Apptivities - activities to use with the apps. 

Check out the list below to find FREE and budget priced apps along with FREE advice as to how to use them. 

Last year, Jeremy Legaspi, told us about 16 Halloween apps and how to use them in therapy on his post,  Appdapted: Halloween Themed Apps, at ASHAsphere.

SPEECH2U posted some of her favorite Halloween apps along with suggestions as to how they can be used at A gazillion Ghoulish Games and Apps. And, her 2012 post, Halloween Masks, tells how she uses the app, Mask Mania and other masks or head gear with a variety of speech and language skills. 

At Technology and Speech Therapy Corner, Heather Strebel, posted a FREE printable barrier game activity to be used with the app Monster Mash Lite. 


Enjoy!

Diana

© 2013

Halloween is Just Two Weeks Away and the Pumpkin is Stuck on the Vine: Speech and Language Activities for Big Pumpkin by Erica Silverman

My favorite book for Halloween is Big Pumpkin written by Erica Silverman and illustrated by S. D. Schindler. I read this book many times at the request of my own children in the 1990s and am pleased that it is still readily available. 

My students loved the retelling the story with props. Visit The Home Teacher and scroll to the bottom to see her cute story props. Her nomenclature cards can also be used for storytelling. 

At Make Learning Fun, find a story stick, felt board pictures, a word wall, sequencing cards, and more. 

Find this at Chapel Hill Snippets

There are a lot of speech and language opportunities in the FREE Big Pumpkin Reports for students preschool to grades 3 at Teaching Heart.net

Find printable story props, made with Boardmaker, at Chapel Hill Snippets. 

Freda, at Frogs in First, wrote that this book works well when talking about story elements. Characters are clearly defined and there are only two settings and a well designed problem and solution. Check out her graphic organizers created for Big Pumpkin. 

There are eleven FREE activities, made for Big Pumpkin, at Teachers pay Teachers.  

Kat Anderson reads Big Pumpkin on Vimeo. This could be part of a great take-home activity.

Enjoy!!

Diana

© 2013