Back to School Challenge!

I saw something similar on another blog a while back, and would give credit, but I honestly don't remember where it was...  I've been meaning to have my students do a similar challenge for some time, and thought that back to school is a perfect time to get them back into the swing of things.  I'm really hoping that my challenging my students to skip past the sticker system and get a prize immediately we can get back where we were at last spring as fast as possible.

I'm going to challenge my articulation students to say their sound correctly 150 times during a speech session and reward them with a trip to the prize box when they meet the challenge.  I'm planning on giving my students several opportunities to get 150 correct productions in a single session.  During a typcial speech session, each my my articulation students has 200-250 total productions, so I'm hoping this is a reasonable goal for most of my older students.

 But, for some of my younger students and students who qualified for services at the end of last year, 150 isn't a realistic goal.  Thus, I give you the 80 correct production challenge.  As many of my students do know each other, I am going to introduce the half sheet with the challenge on it at the beginning of the school year to my new students, and then have them let me know when they are ready to attempt the challenge.

Now, I'm not going to leave my language and fluency students out.  I'm going to challenge my language students to tell me five things they did this summer and one thing they are excited about for the school year.  My school is focusing on literacy and writing, so my sheet does have fill in the blanks on it.  I usually expect my students to write 1-3 words, and of course spelling doesn't count.  The real challenge won't be in what I'm expecting them to be able to put on the paper, I'm hoping to be able to get some information about responding to questions, story telling, vocabulary use, grammar and all of that good stuff.  I'm hoping that by offering a price by completing the sheet to *my* satisfaction, I can engage some of my more reluctant students (and reward the ones that were always going to tell me!).

As of now I'm planning on doing the Language Challenge with my fluency students.  I've thought about having them tell me what they remember about stuttering from last year for the challenge, but then I remembered that I have several students who qualified last year and haven't yet started therapy...  As I've said above, my students all seem to know each other (even in a 1200 kid elementary school and across grade levels) so I'm planning on keeping things as fair as possible.  By doing the things this summer with my fluency students I hope to continue to build rapport and the safe space all of my fluency students will either be new to speech or in new groups this year.

The google docs are here:
Articulation - 150 Sound Challenge
Articulation - 80 Sound Challenge
Language Challenge


What is everyone else doing to get their kids back into therapy?