Welcome!

I have  started this blog for speech and language pathologist, speech graduate students, teachers, and parents.   I’m hoping it can be a source of ideas and materials to get kids talking.
There are many kids receiving speech therapy services in a variety of settings for a variety of reasons.  Speech and Language Pathologist are the people who conduct an evaluation and actually determine if a child has a speech delay.  They are the  best professional to determine the specific speech and language needs of individual children and a plan for therapy.    Once correct responses are established during therapy, it takes practice to get children to  use them in everyday life.  In many cases the final goal is reached when a child can produce corrected clear “spontaneous speech”.

In order to give a child practice with specific grammatical structures, pragmatic skills, vocabulary, or speech sounds,  materials are needed to elicit and practice  specific responses.   There is a need to practice in a variety of settings with a variety of people.  I think most therapists can agree that getting good speech habits out of the therapy room can sometimes be the biggest challenge. Over the years I’ve acquired a collection of materials and ideas.  I thought it would be helpful to organize it and make them available to others who find the need to get a child to practice his or her speech in spontaneous utterances.  This site also serves as a tool box and record  for me.  I can look back and see some of the options I have explored the last couple of  years.

As you travel  through the pages,  you will find activities and downloads  you can use to elicit specific responses.   Many of the activities are meant to be printed onto card stock and cut into cards.  They should turn out to be the size of business cards.   You may feel free to use any of the activities  for  children on your caseload, in your classrooms, or your individual child.  Do not  copy them  for commercial purposes or place them on another site without permission.  It is OK if you  place a link back to this site.   I’m trying to respect  trademarks and copy-write agreements, so please let me know if I  have  inadvertently  infringed on any.  Your responses are my motivation so please  give me feedback on how activities work for you.  Tell me any difficulties you encounter.   I may be able to make improvements to the original.

All these materials are best used under the direction of a speech pathologist and I can not guarantee results.

© Cynthia Montalbano and In Spontaneous Speech, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material for commercial purposes without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Cynthia Montalbano and In Spontaneous Speech with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

A New Pear Pair Homonym Tree

It is that time of year again and my students are asking for the Homonym Tree.  If you remember from a previous  year post, I put up a tree in the Spring and the students write homonyms on paper pears to earn a Dum Dum sucker.  This year it is even easier for me because one of my fellow teacher ordered a pear die cut.  I don’t need to cut out folded stacks of paper. How incredibly thoughtful of her. The tree looks different every year.  This year we ran out of brown butcher paper so it ended up mainly black.  it will have a lot more pears on it by the end of the year.

Bad Thing, Good Thing; It is the perspective you take..

I imagine some of you are wrapping up your school year and ready for a break.  We still have 4 weeks to go here.  I am still doing lesson planning in the middle of all those end of the year IEPs and progress reports.  I can’t help thinking about last year’s contract negotiation issues which caused an unplanned for week off.  This year is going much better.  Looking at the bright side, I developed some strong relationships with my fellow teachers with all that walking.  It paid off in my interactions this school year.  This got me thinking about how bad things often have a silver lining, and how that carries us through to a better future.   My inflexible thinkers often have difficulty seeing this possibility and have difficulty making a recovery when things go badly.  It may be one of the most important life skills  to develop.  If you are using a Social Thinking Curriculum by Michelle Garcia Winner, http://www.socialthinking.com, it fits in well with determining  “The size of the problem.”

I decided to address this ability to turn a bad thing into a good thing more directly. We’ve been using cards I made called “Bad Thing Good Thing’.  I started using them with my 3^rd and 4^th graders who are part of a social skills group. That was tough.  The inability to think flexibly was very apparent and they needed a lot of prompting to think otherwise.  The 5^th grader did better.  I was worried that I might have created something too difficult for the age range so I brought them out for my articulation students working on sounds in conversational speech.  The 3^rd graders through 5^th graders were able to do them without prompting and pretty automatically.  I concluded that these cards were very telling about a deficit area.

I am putting the full set of 32 cards on TPT.

I am listing the first 11 cards here  Good Thing no. eleven cards.  I would love to get your feed- back on how they work for your students.

Game Adaptation for Crocodile Dentist

Here are two adaptations for the game Crocodile Dentist.  This is a plastic crocodile that has a spring loaded mouth.  The mouth closes when a certain tooth is pushed down. Kids enjoy the suspense of seeing who is going to get bit.  The trigger tooth changes location each time the mouth is opened. Some of you may already use this game for reinforcement.  I thought you might like to know how you can expand its use a little further.  I use it to expand a student’s verbal output to 2 to 3 word phrases using a communication board and to review prepositions when following directions.

Using permanent markers, I colored the teeth alternating colors.  I used pink, green, and orange because I already had a die that had those colors.  If you don’t have a die you could make a spinner or use colors for a die you have.

For my students with limited verbal abilities, I use the communication board along with the die in a plastic jar.  I have the students shake the die to get the color of tooth they need to push down.  I then model phrases using the communication board while playing the game.  The game creates a lot of opportunities for repetition of phrases such as “I have ….” or “push down green tooth”.  I also reinforce saying “your turn” and “my turn.”   After repetition the students start to say the appropriate phrase when you point to the correct icons as a prompt.  Finally, they may prompt themselves by pointing to the icons and verbalizing.  This is a good way to break up an imitative pattern that often happens when training non-verbal children and uses a natural context for turn taking.

The colors are used in the direction cards also.  Cards were made using the concept vocabulary:  next to, beside, between, right, left, colors, not, side, front, either/or.  Children take turns drawing the cards and following the directions for the tooth to be pushed down.  We play a variation by giving each child three poker chips.  They feed the crocodile a chip if he bites.  The person who feeds all three chips is the winner.   I provided a word program down load because I thought people may need to adjust the color words for their needs. If you have any difficulties with this, leave me a comment.  Print out the cards and have the students pull them out of a bag and then follow the directions while playing the game.

card download here

Trial and Error Pass

This is an activity I use with my  social pragmatic groups.   The activity requires students to use a trial and error method of problem solving.  It is a good one to use for defeating  Rock Brain because to be successful students need to be willing to try  different moves.  For students  who fall apart when they are wrong,  it provides opportunity to defeat Glass Man.  This activity can be used to reinforces the idea that mistakes are not necessarily bad and can be used for learning.  It is important to talk about this before you begin so students have the tools to work through their feelings in a constructive manner.

This activity also teaches students to work together toward a common goal.  The solution will be found by observing the mistakes of everyone and it would be very difficult to succeed individually.  Students  also need to use their short term memory and make inferences to predict the pattern.

This activity can be used with small groups of students, two competing teams, or with one or two students.  The object of the game is to cross  a   6×6 grid of steps using the correct pattern.  I lay the grid out on the floor so that students have a good view and can use motor movement.

Pattern cards are made           A judge, who could be a student or teacher, is selected.  The judge takes one of the pattern cards that will be the solution to the stepping pattern.  A student begins the challenge by stepping on one of the stars in the first row and moves one row ahead for each step.    As the move is made the judge indicates if it is the correct one by saying right or wrong move.  A buzzer for a wrong move adds a game show feature and are available free as an app.   If it is the right step the student continues to move forward.  If it is the wrong step the person returns to the start or the end of the line and watches the attempts of others until they get to the front of the line again.  The students may notice that a pattern is developing as students discover the correct moves.  This will speed up the progress until someone finally makes it across.  Everyone that was paying attention can then make the crossing.  Students should be reinforced for working as a team and not as an individual competition to make it to the finish.

It doesn’t take much to  make pattern cards  and a  grid  on your own.  However, if you prefer to have some of the work done for you, I am putting a set up on the TPT store for download at a minimum cost.

Spring is for the Birds

It is time for a new Spring bulletin board.   I became inspired by the paper curl bird on fun family crafts here.  I changed it a little bit mainly because I didn’t think my students would be able to handle that many paper curls.  

I continue to try to have some speech therapy value with the bulletin board.  This one will promote giving and following directions as well as  understanding idioms.   As in the past  I used the app  Storykit  to have students produce and narrate the instructions on making the birds. I hope you have found this great free app by now.  It is in the blog roll if you need to find it.    Here is the story kit link to How you make Paper Birds.   If you use the app it will look like a book with pages rather than a story board.

My older students will have a homework component. I made flyers with idioms printed on them and they can either write or tell me the meaning after researching it.  Here is the flyer. Bird phrases.   I’ve been giving animal crackers for a reward lately.  They go with the theme of Spring animals and I tell myself they aren’t as bad as giving candy. The students seem to like to work for them.

This is the look of the bulletin board so far. The birds are suppose to be sitting on wires.   I guess you could say it is a work in progress.

Before and After Picture Sentence Cards

It is Spring Break for me.  I have time to get some creative juices flowing.    Just before break, we had our annual book fair.  One of the  hot items was a “Top Secret UV Pen”.  I was lucky enough to get one before they sold out, although teachers were saying it was one of the main items they had to confiscate later after multiple reminders to put it away.  Maybe I should have just waited and one would have come my way.  Anyway they are pretty inexpensive, in the $3 range.  Book fairs are not that different from school to school so maybe you have seen the pens too.  I know you are itching to try it out so I am providing the perfect opportunity.

When  I saw this item an idea came to mind.   I knew my students enjoyed a Super Duper item that had a decoder light.  I thought I could make some of my cards more motivating by using it in the same way.   It would be perfect for my before and after cards.   Many of my students have difficulty with the semantics of when to use before or after.   I made  a deck of before and after cards with pictures for my non readers quite a few years ago.  They were lost in my move last Spring and  I dearly missed those cards.  Unfortunately they weren’t digital. This pen motivated me to make  another set.   This time I left a frame where I used the UV pen to  write before and after depending on the sentence.  The students can light up the answer to see if they are correct. The cards are still very useful even if you don’t have the UV light.

I made a free set of 9 cards on 3 pages for you to try out.  If you have the UV light you can add the light the answer feature.  I am not sure if the UV will work if they are laminated.  I’ll have to see when I get back to work.  Anyway try out these free cards and if you want more I’ll have a set of 30 at the TPT store.

TPT store set of 21 in addition to the 9 trial cards.

WordPress before and after free set of 9 trial  cards

Making Descriptive Sentences for an Easter Activity

I have five days left before Spring Break and I realized Easter is coming faster than I thought.  It will be done when we come back from Spring Break and I haven’t even pulled out the plastic Easter eggs.   The  Easter eggs always add a  little variety to the speech therapy sessions. In preparation for this,  I updated the Descriptive Sentences Activity that is in the Expressive Language section.  It now has 20 basic sentences and I added color and visual cues to the spinner.  It is free at the TPT store here.  I will print out the basic sentences and insert them in the eggs.  The students will pull them out and spin the spinner to make  more elaborate sentences.  If they succeed they will keep the egg.  If not, it will get thrown back into the basket.  I will give some sort of little prize to the person with the most eggs.