Making It Work: 3 Steps for Using Adapted Books and Play

Did you leave my last post about combining books with play thinking, “Those are great ideas, but how do I do that?”  Then this post is for you!

Step 1: Choose a theme!

Having a picnic is the theme I’ll be using since it is lots of fun and has so many options. Themes allow you to :

      • Make groups work when you have to switch your groups around for make-up sessions.

      •  Coordinate with the theme being used in a pre-K or K classroom.

      • Get out a limited set of toys, books and craft activities for the time you are using the theme.

• Start collecting fun toys and activities to expand your theme for next year.

Step 2: Choose and adapt a book!

There are so many choices!

⁃ Start by looking at what you already have around or can get inexpensively. Planning ahead and looking at the Scholastic Book club choices can be a good way to go, so parents can get the same book for home carryover!

⁃ Often it is good to have a higher level book and a lower level one for your theme, so you can meet most of the goals you are working on and have a cohesive set of follow-up activities for everyone.

⁃ Look at the pictures in the book. Does the text talk about what is happening in the picture or can you adapt the text easily so that they match? Our students need to have this visual matching support to make sense of the language in the text.

⁃ Adapt the book so that your lower level students can fill in the vocabulary words while your higher level students can complete the sentences. This can be done easily if you have more than one place with a blank Velcro spot to add the missing symbols. Just choose which set of symbols to remove depending on the needs of each student or group.

Step 3: Choose your follow-up activities!

You want these activities to reinforce the language and concepts for the theme and the book. Best practice would have you read the entire book first before you focus on sections of it for skill building.

- Start with the object vocabulary. 

Find toys or bring in the real items to elicit the labels. How about a picnic basket filled with the items you are talking about? Students can take turns putting their hand in the basket without peeking and pull out an item to label.

- Re-enact the plot sequence by doing the activity. 

This is a great way to reinforce the object labels and introduce the verbs. If your students can handle it, go outside to an enclosed area and have a picnic with their favorite snack and drink. 

Do you have runners? Then have a picnic on your therapy room floor with the door closed. Still won’t work? Put a plastic tablecloth or red bulletin board paper over your table and have your picnic there while your student is in the accustomed seating.

- Now that your students have some experience with a picnic, go back to your adapted  book and see how successful they are at completing it. Note their errors to choose which follow up activities to use:

* Play having a picnic with toys.

* Do a craft to make/decorate/color the vocabulary items.

* Play a game with pictures of the activities involved in the theme.

* Watch a You-tube video associated with the theme.

* Use an interactive activity on your iPad for the theme. BOOM Cards are great for this!

* Make flip book activity for forming sentences.

* Adapt a picture worksheet to make an interactive activity, or have your higher level students just complete the worksheet.

* Have students fill in more of the symbols in your adapted book, or use additional books to expand their language for the theme.

Here are some picnic theme ideas to check out:

Enjoy! Linda

3 Fun Activities for Valentine's Day!

Valentine's Day is just around the corner, so maybe you are looking for some fun activities with that theme! I have a lot to share today!

First, I've joined with a group of my SLP friends to host a Wishlist Giveaway! You know how that TpT wishlist just keeps getting longer, and somehow we can never get it all?

Well, maybe you will be one of the lucky winners in this contest! The Rafflecopter link is at the end of the post. But, HURRY! It ends tonight!

Next, how about a trio of freebies? The choices cover different ages and levels, so hopefully there is something here with your name on it!

Boom Cards

Your littles will have fun helping Teddy plan his Valentine's Day party by finding the items that go with the holiday. If you haven't tried Boom Learning yet, you should! You drag the answer in this game, and it bounces back to give you another turn if you were wrong! Click here to try it out!

Open Ended Valentine's Fun 

This free packet at TpT is a must have. You can work on any skill while playing games to help the monsters get the right colored Valentine's Day card, or while playing the printable game. Get it here!

Social Skills Conversation Hearts

These activities are built to be adaptable for varied age and skill level groups. You can even add the conversation hearts candy into the mix to spice up some interest! Having a quick and easy fun activity that works for mixed groups is a lifesaver when you have one of those days when the coffee just isn't kicking in! Get it here! 

Newly Updated!

I hope you have been getting notices to let you know when I have updated older products! It would be a shame if you missed out on the extra pages and prettier clipart you get with each update!

This week, I updated Homophones for Valentine's Day and year round. It now includes more worksheets, heart themed homework pages, file folder activities and listening activities for improving inferring from sentence context! Check it out, or re-download it, here!

WISHLIST GIVEAWAY ends Friday, February 9 at midnight. Join the contest now!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Exciting News at Looks Like Language!

Do you ever feel like the list of things you need to do is unmanageable? And then, how happy and relieved do you feel when you accomplish something on that list?

Then, celebrate with me!

First, I am so excited to have my Speech and Language Activities: Roll It, Say It, Write It! featured in the TpT newsletter! You can get it here.

Next, I have been thinking for a long time about how I could make some no prep, no print materials that  are interactive, fun and easy to use (and also did not require me to jump through hoops to learn a complicated technology.)

I’m thrilled to have found a solution!  I am starting to incorporate quick and easy Boom Learning card sets into my printable sets, so you can have the best of both worlds! I just hope that you are as excited as I am when you try out my free and preview sets. My sets let your students drag the right answers on the page, and give them another chance if they make a mistake. So fun!

Give BOOM Cards a try!

Kids are sure to have fun with this interactive car themed activity that incorporates words with ’R’ sounds for articulation practice, WH questions and categories. Get the answer right to power up your car!

Download it here.

You can also try out free trials of paid activities to see if they are right for you.

How about spreading some kindness? There are two levels that coordinate with my matching printable set.

Acts of kindness is a picture level set for students to find the kind action and drag it to their kindness plate to fill it up with some yummy cupcakes.

Working on vocabulary for emotions and character traits to help your students discuss kind and unkind actions? Try the free trial of Vocabulary for Acts of Kindness (requires some reading.)

After you’ve given them a try, I’d love for you to provide feedback at my store as a thank you!

Enjoy! Linda

3 Ways to Teach Saying Thank You! Even When You Don't Mean It!

Little kids get reminded by their parents all the time: “Say please.” “Say thank you.” This is how we start teaching politeness. Politeness and manners are such important social skills!

When friction develops, manners can keep a situation calm enough to talk it out instead of fighting. In normal every day life, it is practice beginning to be able to take another’s perspective.

Think about it it- who does saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ benefit? The speaker or the listener? Obviously, the listener or we wouldn’t have to work so hard to get kids into the routine of saying it!

Although they may say it faithfully as a learned routine, children with autism may have a difficult time understanding why it is important. Even more difficult- saying thank you when you don’t like the gift!

To help with this important skill, I have 3 ideas for you today!

PRACTICE the ROUTINE

Young or nonverbal children can benefit from practicing the routine. This adapted book will let you put items that your students like and dislike in the presents to visually teach that we still say thank you. Opening presents is such a fun activity, even when it is make believe!

Get this fun social skills activity here. 

Of course, having some decorated boxes to open up and see a real toy inside is a great activity to coordinate with the book. You can read more about it here.

FEELINGS and WORDS

This free game from my store gets kids identifying how receiving different toys would make them feel and giving an appreciative response anyway. Try it out here. 

Kind feedback is always appreciated!

EXPLAINING  WHY

This social rules story can help your older children or students to begin to understand why it is important to say thank you for gifts we don’t really want. One page is filled in completely as an example.

Click here to download this freebie as my way of saying,"Thank you for your support!"

The second page is a fill in the blank. You can use this page as a basis for discussion and letting your students fill in answers that are pertinent to their lives.

Discussion questions could include:

* Did you ever get a present that you didn’t like?

* How did you react? What did you do or say?

* How did they person who gave you the gift react? What did they do or say?

* How did your reaction make them feel?

* Is that how you want that person to feel?

* What could you do differently next time?

* What could you say differently next time?

* How can you help yourself sound sincere? Sincere means you really mean it. We show that in our facial expressions, body language and tone of voice.

You can use all of these resources at holiday time or for birthdays! Enjoy!

5 Reasons to Assess Narrative Skills

Are books a vital part of your planning? I can't imagine doing without them, personally, but teaching your students internet literacy is just as important. If you teach students from disadvantaged homes, they may not have the same level of access to computers, so they especially need it included in every aspect of school life to gain digital skills.

The other bonus for us is that we can try out books online to see if our students engage with them, purchasing the book only if we decide it is one of our favorites to use over and over again!

One of my students introduced me to this YouTube video last year, and it has become one of my new favorites! Although I love the paperback version of Don't Laugh at Me by Steve Seskin, the song version is a great way to introduce it.  At back to school time, as students are getting to know each other, it is a natural time to find out about their likes, dislikes, and characteristics and incorporate a theme of acceptance of our differences. Give this one a try!

Checking students' narrative skills is on the top of my list for back to school assessments. Whether you do this orally or in a written format, there is so much information you can gain to help your students make progress over the year!

Beside the fact that this is an essential basic skill for conversations, discussion and writing, you can see how well they

* retrieve and organize information while staying on topic

* if there are word finding issues

* the level of sentence complexity

* grammatical errors

* how well they carried over skills from the previous year, including articulation skills.

There are so many fun, free websites at all levels of skill that can help you do this with little planning! Check out this post to get a comprehensive list! I double checked- all of the links still work.

If you need to justify this use of your time to school administrators, check out the results of this study by Ron Owston et al.  In their study called Computer game development as a literacy activity, they found that "Field notes and teacher interview data indicated that game development helped improve student content retention, ability to compare and contrast information presented, utilize more and different kinds of research materials including digital resources, editing skills, and develop an insight into questioning skills."

What is your favorite book or website for literacy?

Helping Our Students Transition to Independence

Transitioning? What?

You might be wondering if these links have nothing useful for you, but if you are working with a moderately to severely impaired population, then it is my opinion that you can never get started thinking about this too early!

Our students who have moderate to severe deficits need us to be the ones who are thinking ahead and planning how to build their skills to their greatest potential! Since they need so much practice with work presented at tiny little steps, it will only help if we all have in mind the eventual desired outcomes as we plan each year's therapy.

With this in mind, maybe you want to take a look at these links even if your students are still younger!

The complete list of links can be found in this post.

If you don't have time to check out the complete list, I recommend that you at least go to my most favorite download, Moving Toward Functional Social Competence.

The Minnesota Region 10 Low Incidence Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) project compiled this thorough checklists at three levels for joint attention, greetings, self regulation, conversations, perspective taking, social problem solving/critical thinking skills, friendship and life skills. They also included a recommended resource list for further reading. 

Be sure to download this helpful free resource!

I hope you are enjoying your summer!