ABCYa.com - A Wonderful Therapy Resource!

Make An Easter Egg allows children to decorate and hide eggs. Choose an egg, decorate it with paint, stickers, and/or letters. Put a toy in the egg and hide and find your eggs. Good activity for follow directions, using descriptive words, answering WH questions, and using words that tell location. Use two laptops to make a very motivating barrier game!

Visit ABCYa.com to find a nice variety of open ended activities that can be used in speech and language therapy. 

Build A House allows you to structure therapy for almost any lesson.
Students choose house parts, trees, and other outdoor items.
Work on articulation, plurals, and where questions and location words.
Ask why questions, increase utterance length and follow directions. 

Find stories at for children in kindergarten to 5th grade.

Build a house. 

Make a pumpkin, a snowman, a gingerbread house, a pizza and a cake. 

Create a car and a robot. 

Students can create their own word clouds, crossword puzzles, and word searches. 

Find many activities for phonemic awareness. 

Numerous counting and math activities are a great way to practice target sounds. 

Skills for students in upper grades include subject verb agreement,
parts of speech, antonyms, synonyms and homonyms.
These students could create a crossword puzzle with vocabulary words
or create a word search of target words for articulation practice. 

Have you used this site for speech and language therapy? If so, comment below to share your ideas. 

Diana

© 2014

Tuesday's Treasure Box: Word Clouds for Your Therapy Sessions

As I was playing with my new app, Word Clouds by ABCYa.com, I thought of all of the ways that you could use word clouds in therapy - story vocabulary, classification, describing, articulation practice . . . 

Word Clouds was the only FREE app of its kind that I could find in iTunes. However, it is free for only a LIMITED TIME!

Not to worry though, I just tried Tagxedo, Wordle, and Word Clouds for Kids; all websites that allow you to make FREE word clouds on your computer. I liked Tagxedo as it allowed for the most customization. Word Clouds for Kids was the easiest to use and Wordle fell between the two, with some customization. These sites would be perfect to project on your whiteboard for group work or to use as independent centers. 

Other SLPs have been using these word cloud websites for quite some time. Check out the blog posts below to see their great ideas!

• See how Abby at Schoolhouse Talks uses Word Cloud at ABCYa's website for articulation and language activities in her post Word Cloud Creations.  

• Maureen, at The Speech Bubble, shows us how to use Tagxedo in Using Word Clouds for Describing: Tagxedo Tutorial. 

• Visit LiveSpeakLove where Lisa Geary writes about four websites that she has used to make word clouds in her post Fun with Word Clouds. 

Enjoy!

Diana

© 2014

Spring into Speech and Language with 25+ Free Resources

It was officially spring just a few days ago and the weather couldn't be nicer in my neck of the woods! Here are some FREE spring activities to start out the season. 

Speech Time Fun has FREE Spring Association Activities.  

Find Spring Mini Books at Carl's Corner.

Spring Prepositions And Vocabulary- Dora The Explorer, from Speech Language Play, will be a favorite for the younger set. 

Find a variety of spring ideas at Speech Gadget.


At 2 Gals Talk . . . about speech, spring activities take place outside. 

There are some excellent suggestions for parents and SLPs at Speech and Language Kids. Listen to the podcast and/or her read her Spring Speech Therapy Activities Notes to learn how this SLP incorporates following directions, multisyllabic word practice, sequencing, and vocabulary skills into her spring lessons. 

Not just eggs at Spring Egg-stravaganza! Lisa, at LiveSpeakLove, features a Spring Bingo, a spring pragmatic activity, and /s/ stimulus cards. You can download visuals for making a bunny, a cute chick, a flower garden and more. 

Download FREE Spring and Easter Bingo boards at Heather Speech Therapy.

Some of my past spring related posts include:

Forty Fabulous Flower Activities for Speech and Language  

A Dozen Ways to Talk About Rain in Speech and Language Therapy

  

Eggs and Birds for Speech and Language - Free Downloads and More

  

More Eggs and Birds - Links and Apps

  

Bugs - Just Crawling with Ideas!   

Try out Cindy Meester's unique Bobbing our way into Spring!!! 

Find adapted books and more in Ruth Morgan's Springtime Collection at Chapel Hill Snippets.

The Spring Vocabulary List: Speech and Language Activities at Sam's Blog is perfect for parents. 

Sesame Street has activities for every season. Introduce your vocabulary or concept by showing and talking about one of the many video clips found at this site.  Use the ready-made playlists or search for "spring" to see more than 40 video clips, songs, and games for the season. Click here to see an example of a video that might be a wonderful introduction to a lesson about plants and seeds. 

As always, I like the Preschool and Toddler Activity Calendars at Preschool Express. These are such practical resources for parents. AND, look at the Spring Story Skills at Story Station. These suggestions for parents are also good therapy ideas. 

Check out these links at Scholastic and Reading Rockets for some great spring read-alouds.

KizClub has ready-to-print story props for over 75 popular children's literature selections. Spring titles include books such as Quick as a Cricket, Rain, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Skip through the Seasons, Whose Baby Am I?, and Spring is Here. 

Find many, many teacher/student made spring books with beautiful photos at Tar Heel Reader. 

Don't forget to search for your spring themed books at WeGiveBooks.org. I found many books about butterflies, flowers, and bugs. 

Printable spring ready-mades at Speaking of Speech.com and SET-BC will save you so much time!

At last check, Teachers Pay Teachers had more than 100 FREE spring activities under the speech therapy specialty. I searched for "spring," but search specifically for your spring theme and I am sure that you will find even more!

An Amazon Affiliate Link

Make Learning Fun has activities to use with the book Wake Up, It's Spring! by Lisa Campbell Ernst and the Spring Emergent Reader is a good repetitive book for early language learners. 

And last, but not least, the clip art in this post came from MyCuteGraphics where you will find FREE clip art for printing, scrap-booking, teacher created lessons, craft projects, your blog and more!

Diana

© 2014

Clip art from MyCuteGraphics