Tangled Tuesday!  I was excited to get hooked up with Amy from Major Speech Pathology Fun by a Minor Girl for her Tangled Tuesday feature on her blog.  I always love her materials, so I was excited when she offered up her United States Listening Comprehension/ Reading Comprehension Activity for the swap.    Here are some samples of what you will find in this awesome packet!    Activities for Listening or Reading Comprehension:   This is a great packet full of information on all 50 states.  There are four cards for each state:   state information   famous people   comprehension questions with choice of four answers  comprehension questions without answer choices All of the cards can be used for either listening or reading comprehension. There is a black and white map that students can color in.  You can use this with the question cards.  Students are each asked a question from the card.  If they get the answer correct, they can color in...

I am always looking for ways to work with my students with ASD on creating sentences about pictures.  I stumbled upon this app, Colourful Semantics by London Speech Therapy, that looked really promising. I was lucky enough to be able to review this app, and the creators of this app were also generous enough to offer three apps for a GIVEAWAY! Colourful Semantics is based on research carried out in the UK (1997 and 2011) to work on developing a student's: spoken sentences answering WH-questions use of nouns, verbs, prepositions and adjectives story telling skills written sentences written language comprehension To start using this app, you first click the Setup button.  Next, you choose your user.  You can either create a new user or an existing user. Then, you choose the level that you want to work on.  There are 5 levels: who, what doing, what, where, and describe.  On the preset pictures, I have not noticed that you can really use the 'what' or '...

****Updated for 2014!!!**** Summer is coming!!!  I cannot be more excited!!!! Every year, I stress out about how I am going to get all of my packets together for students to practice over the summer.  My first few years, I would copy pages specifically for each student.  This was really time consuming, and I found that students were really not completing the work.  My packets started getting smaller and smaller, and I didn't really feel like I was sending home things that were interesting or engaging.  I decided that if I could get my students to at least think about their speech or language for a few minutes every day, it would be better than the practice I was getting from them in previous years.  A few minutes a day over the course of the whole summer, could add up to a bunch of time focusing on speech or language!  So, I started to create some summer calendars for both speech and language and passing them out at the end of the year.  In the fall, parents started to approa...

I love finding fun ways to get my students with ASD to communicate, comment, and request.  Mr. Potato Head is a great activity that lends itself to lots of requesting for multiple items.  Plus, it works on body parts too. There are so many different sets of Mr. Potato Head out there right now.  One of the ASD teachers that I work with had an industrial size bin from Costco that had two potatoes, lots of hats, eyes, ears, lips, teeth,etc., and even some hair!  I asked to borrow this jumbo bin today and had fun with students who were able to use sentence strips to request the parts that they wanted to put on the potato.  Here is the little guy we created: I used a huge board that I purchased from Pyramid Educational Consultants as a place for all of my icons and a sentence strip.  Students placed their icons on the sentence strip and requested each piece.  I made it simple and only had one choice for each piece (i.e., one nose, one mouth, etc.).  If you want to add attributes to...

Today, I brought out the really high tech stuff!  A cookie sheet and a marker!!!!  I found the cookie sheet at the dollar store, and use it for some magnetic activities.  I found these great markers with the erasers on the ends at Office Max.  The kids LOVE using these.  I was able to use these two very simple items in some very different ways.  The first student who used these items comes to speech in a one-on-one session.  We are working on both articulation and language skills.  The first objective we targeted was using /th/ in CV combinations.  I wrote "th" on one side of the cookie sheet and 5 vowels on the other side of the sheet.  Then, I drew a line from the th to each of the vowels.  The student was then told to say /th/ while erasing the line and then ending with the vowel sound that it connected to.  She loved doing this, and it really helped her to draw out the /th/ and combine it with the vowel sound. The next objective we targeted was naming items i...

A couple of weeks ago, my gmail account went a little batty, and I accidentally sent a copy of my Secret Code Idioms that I was sending to my work email to Maureen over at The Speech Bubble .  She graciously said that she would love to swap materials and review each others packets.  Wow, was I ever lucky!  I got to reveiw her great packet called Camp Go-Together: Associations and Analogies .  This was exactly what I needed to work with several of my students.   There are three different activities in this packet.  The activities increase in complexity, starting with Association Cookout.  This activity has students identifying how two items are related. E.G., How do Sugar and Candy go together? There are 32 cards in this deck. 16 of the items have multiple choice answers, and 16 have no choices available. This is great to differntiate in groups. I was able to split up the cards and present the ones with choices to a student who was having more difficulty with the concept, and...

I have always thought I was being careful about backing things up on my computer.  I had a flash drive that I used primarily for my Teachers Pay Teachers items that I created, and for items that I have purchased.  I also had most of these items saved on my computer.  It became easy for me to save on the flash drive and then print some things at school.  Well, I got a little lazy about saving twice- once on my flash and once on the computer.  When I went on vacation recently, I had a long drive ahead of me, so I thought, "Hey, I'll work on some of my TpT stuff in the car!"  Well, I did, and forgot to save to the computer, I was just saving to the flash drive.  About 4 hours into the drive on the way home, I put the computer down by my feet.  you can probably guess what happened...  Yep, I completely bent the flash drive, and lost ALL of my data.  Hours upon hours of work gone!  You can also probably guess what my reaction was.  Complete freak out!  I realized how many of...