First Year of Speech in Several Paragraphs

Whoo! It seems like only yesterday I was packing up all my speech materials into boxes and putting them in my little storage shed, only to be opened once again to begin a new speech year! This 2012-2013 school year was my first year as a certified speech language pathologist assistant, or SLPA. It was AMAZING! I learned so much and fell in love with my future career even more!

I am new to this blog thing so for my first post I will sum up my year in a couple of paragraphs. I hope that I give everyone credit accordingly. I am so new to this and def give credit to all the awesome websites that made my first year creative and fun!

August/September: Well... I started my new year at Elgin Elementary! We had a cozy little speech room and even got to make a sign for our door!

This was all about getting to know the kids and figuring out their IEP's and how to implement them with some speech activities. We worked on some All About Me worksheets! For the younger kiddos I used this little workbook since it had pages where the kiddos could cut and paste:

  

 For the older kiddos I used a All about me Robot.

  

Both of these cute About me pages can be found at My Easy Bee

For the little ones we worked on basic kinder concepts: I made this on a word document. It has letters, numbers, colors, verbs, emotions, naming objects, adjectives, etc. Also made one for days of the week, seasons, months in both english and spanish.

Of course we also worked on out speech sounds with the help of the alphabet:

These sheets can be found here SPANISH and here ENGLISH.

This is were I got the Spanish Chart from but you can read all about the ESTRELLITA program here. Includes curriculum, etc. Estrellita
BusyTeachersCafe has tons of really cute material that teachers/therapists/parents/everyone can use with their kiddos!


October/November:  Theses months were 'WORK MODE" We did so many articulation drills, games, following directions, reading comprehension activities that I cant remember them all!! Should've started a blog sooner! We wrote scary stories and even wrote stories about Ms. Nora's Pumpkin Socks!

We read books and answered WH questions, worked on vocabulary. To help me out with this, My boss Maria subscribed to Reading A-Z 

Once subscribed, you have access to tons of books ranging from PK and up. Some are even in Spanish. They all come with worksheets that work on vocabulary, following directions. sight words and even offers a quiz to check comprehension. The kiddos really loved the variety of books and we read and worked on 1 book a month. It was nice to see them do their artic drills, a game, reading comprehension, fluency, writing,etc all in a packed 30 minutes!


December: One of my favorite activities we did was a Christmas Tree food activity which I found at Mom Tried It Check it out!!! Visual step by step directions to make a sugar cone Christmas trees! Its a child's sugar heaven. My speech kiddos really enjoyed this activity. They loved decorating their tree with M&M's, licorice, and sprinkles. Great activity for following directions, sequencing, and we even threw in some articulation practice while making these awesome trees! Here are some of their own creations:

You can visit Mom Tried It to see her Christmas Tree creations and some other cool crafts as well!


SPRING: These months literally flew by so fast so ill just post and describe the activities we did! I found these cute little bean bag things at the headstart program. They are called Search and Find Alphabet bags!  I used them for my artic kiddos. They had fun trying to locate the items then naming them! You can purchase them from Lakeshore Learning!

Games... I used so many games this year! These were the most popular. Angry Birds! I found some really cool ideas from Speech Room News and how to use the Angry Bird Theme appropriately! Click the link to visit the website!

                                               

I didnt have lots of pictures of all the games but other games we used were:

Penguin Pats

Dont Spill the Beans

Clue

Ants in the Can

Wheels on the Bus

Playdoh and Cars

Dynavox and Ipad for Voice Output: Had several students that used V/O devices. It was so much fun learning how to operate these devices and model and show the students how to use them! I also got to experience using the dynavox with EYEGAZE!!! AMAZING! It opened so many doors to some of my students that I actually cried! 

                                               My Fiance testing out the eyegaze dynavox! 

Speech Buddies: These really came in handy. This is a great tool to teach your student placement. I used these several times only if my student could not achieve proper placement independently. Most of my kiddos had trouble with these artic sounds so using the speech buddies was a great tool to help them with proper placement. We would use the speech buddies and also see a videos on youtube demonstrating how to properly use the speech buddy. They really liked using them and even gave some a little confidence boost!  You can purchase the speech buddies HERE. 

Well that pretty much wraps up the year! This year I feel prepared and have tons of fun activities planned ahead. I can;t wait for another great school year and to learn new things in my new profession. To all those Speech therapy blogs, Thank you so much for posting your ideas! It really helped have a great first year.

Links:
SpeechRoomNews
Mom Tried It
Kinder Latino
BusyBeeSpeech
MyEasyBee