Asking Situational Questions

I have been working with some of my students on asking questions on and off all year.  Many of my students are able to formulate questions, but then can't ask questions when they are in the classroom, home or social environments.  They don't know how to ask questions when they are out of my room!  So I got to thinking, and make an asking situational questions activity.  These cards require students to think of a specific situation with a peer, teacher or parent and what they want or need to know.  The students then have to formulate a question to ask in that situation.  The idea behind this activity is to bridge my students question formulation skills, and reduce some of the anxiety about actually asking a question.

Check out Asking Situational Questions in my TPT store!

A total of 80 therapy cards addressing Yes/No, Who, What, When, Where, Why and How questions are included.  8 additional game cards are also included!

An example of Yes/No Questions!

An example of Where questions.

 

Game cards are included.  Students try to collect as many owls as possible.  A sleeping owl causes the student to lose one turn.   If the owls are caught in the student, they must put all of their owls back.  Cards with two owls are worth two points.

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Sports Language Packets

I found this clip art and fell in love.  I have many students who absolutely love sports and I'm always looking for ways to engage them in therapy sessions.  I created three sports packets with a sports theme!  Everything in the packets (with a few exceptions) is completely in a sports theme.  All the stories for comprehension and problem solving as well as the sentences are sports related.

You can check out all three in my TPT store!
Sports Language for Pragmatics
Sports Language Set
Sports Activities for Grammar

The first set is the Pragmatics Set!

All parts of the pragmatics set are in a sports theme.

There are 20 inferences cards with bonus game cards.

24 problem solving paragraphs with game cards included.

18 joke cards to use to work on joke telling and social skills!  These are also great to use with articulation and fluency generalization.

18 idioms with a sports origin are discussed with meanings and sentence examples!

16 conversation cards with bonus game cards round out the pragmatic activities.  All conversation cards have a sports related topic.  These would also be great to use with articulation and fluency students for generalization skills.

All of my sports sets include a bonus Cariboo topper.

Check out the Sports Language for Pragmatics in my TPT store and have fun!

Next up is my Sports Set for Language!
Sports Language Set

Similarities and differences and following directions are not completely in a sports theme.

Comprehension questions have a short paragraph followed by three questions.  All stories are sports related!  Game cards are included.  24 story cards.

One and two step following directions.  This is the sports set, so you will need some kind of ball to follow the directions.  I'm planning on using a soft ball like a thumbball when working on the directions.

Students need to label one way items are similar and different for each card.  Game cards are included.

Fact and opinion cards are all in a sports theme.  The second, not picture page, has fill in the blank cards for local sports teams.  "The _______ are the best football team."    This is to allow for variation in all the different places we live, and for kids to explore fan-opinions.

The Sports Language Set also includes the Cariboo top, pictured above.

Grab the Sports Language Set in my TPT store!

Last is the Sports Grammar Set
The Sports Activities for Grammar set is the biggest of the three sets.  I kept thinking of different activities for grammar that I wanted to work on!

 

 The pronouns set works on She/Her/Hers, He/His/Him and They/Their pronouns.  Cards for each pronoun are included.

18 regular plurals cards, 9 paired plural nouns.  All plurals have a sports theme!

18 irregular plural cards, 9 paired plural nouns.  These don't have a sports them, since there aren't enough irregular plural nouns for that!

Regular past tense verbs cards, words and sentences with a sports theme! 

Irregular past tense verbs, in words and sentences with a sports theme!

Finally third person singular verbs!  Fill in the blank sentences with a sports theme.

Cariboo cards, pictured above are also included with this unit.

Grab the Sports Activities for Grammar in my TPT store!




 

Big Chickens - Predicting Books

 I recently found my two great books for working on making simple predictions.  Big Chickens and Big Chickens Fly the Coop.  There is a third book in the series, Big Chickens Go to Town, but I haven't gotten it yet. 

About half the pages in these books end with the word "Until....." It is a perfect set up for making predictions.  The book big chickens have the chickens running away from a wolf at the chicken coop and into the woods.  The find many things in the woods they are afraid of and bumble their way into.  At the end of the books the chickens aren't so chicken any more and are feeling much better about themselves, which gives us a chance to talk about character change.

I found the chicken books perfect for my students who are on the autism spectrum.   These books may have animals as characters instead of people, but the illustrator has done a fantastic job with the expressions of the animals in the books. My students and I also spend a lot of time discussing how the chickens (and other animals) were feeling at different points in the book and how we could tell.  We also discussed how people call each other "chickens" when they are acting afraid.

Having a done a few days of making predictions, it's been really interesting how my students are afraid to make predictions at the fear of being wrong.  Many of my kids simply answered "I don't know" and I had to do a lot of choice offering.  Such as "are the chickens going to go into the cave or not?"  One of my boys refused to make predictions or prediction choices at all.  We did a little discussion about what else the chickens did in the book, the chickens end up accidentally doing everything they say they are afraid of (specific to the book Big Chickens), and still he refused.  So more work here we come!  Situations like this make me happy I'm still finding such great things to use in therapy.

I used the books with 2nd through 6th grade.  They worked best with the second and third graders, and an individual ASD fifth grader particularly enjoyed it.

Joke Telling Unit

This year I've noticed a few of my students have really started to get interested in telling jokes.  Unfortunately, this interest doesn't coincide with an understanding of how jokes work.  A few of my students have started telling simple one line "jokes" that are a basic lie about something that happened and following it up with "I joke you" or "I kid you."  As this isn't just happening with me, and has been happening throughout the day, and as a result I ended up with several joke telling goals and objectives.  With this, I needed to make some materials as a place to start with for these students. 

So here is my joke telling unit!
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Objectives:
-Help kids understand how to tell jokes
-Help kids understand why jokes are funny.
-Have kids memorize a few jokes they can tell.
-Teach kids why people tell jokes.

Includes:
-Includes a social story about telling jokes and a description about different kinds of jokes.
-Includes knock-knock and riddle cards for kids to use to tell jokes in speech therapy sessions.
- 24 Knock, Knock joke cards and 36 riddle cards. 6 joke cards for each kind of joke include why this is funny cards because many students who struggle with telling jokes also struggle with figurative and other non-literal language. Once you’ve used the cards to explain why some of the jokes are funny let your students figure out the rest of the jokes.

Instructions:
-Cut and laminate all materials.
-Read the social stories on telling jokes and kinds of jokes with your students. Let your students pick the
kind of joke they want to start with riddles or knock-knock jokes.
-Read the social story for the kind of joke they want to start with.
-Do the first 6 jokes together. Read the why the jokes are funny cards. Do the students agree? Why are why
not?
-Go through the rest of the kind of jokes. What jokes do each student like and why? Have each student
memorize their favorite joke and tell a friend or teacher outside of the speech room.

I'm so excited for my kids to be able to tell even a few memorized jokes.  Hopefully, they'll generalize some
of the skills, but I'm most looking forward to a better understanding of telling jokes in general.

Check it out on TPT and get your kids laughing!