Best Practices for SLPs

My colleagues and I are getting ready to attend the Best Practices for SLPs Conference sponsored by Georgia Organization of School-Based SLPs (GOSSLP) in Atlanta, Georgia on March 5th - 6th. This is one of our only opportunities for continuing education where we actually get to interact face-to-face with other school-based SLPs. We look forward to this conference every year. Not only is it a time for learning, we get to catch up with old friends, meet new ones, and eat at The Cheesecake Factory and P.F. Changs! Whoop! Whoop!

This year we (along with Jessica Finch, The Speech Peach) registered to do a poster session at the conference.  Our session is entitled, You Know the Drill! Practical, Fun Activities for Increasing Student Engagement During Articulation Drill & Practice. Research indicates drill and practice has been shown to improve performance by "systematic repetition of concepts, examples, and practice" (Lim, Tang, & Kor, 2012).  Additionally, Weichman & Balfanz collected data showing a 27% reduction in caseload when drill and practice activities were used (2007). We all know drill and practice can be so BORING! That's why we wanted to do this poster session, so we could share our ideas on making drill and practice fun for the students.  Our presentation will include SLP-made low-tech and high-tech therapy ideas, commercial products and apps we like and recommend, and TpT products designed for drill and practice.

If any of our blog followers are from Georgia, please plan on stopping by to see us! We are going to have many of the materials on hand for you to see AND we are doing free give-aways!

For those of you who aren't from Georgia, here's a free sample from one of new packs that will soon be available on TpT. I absolutely love this carnival games pack and I cannot wait to use it with my kiddos! The entire pack is designed to be a fun way to create and elicit numerous speech and language practice opportunities. Click the picture below to download your free sample today and be sure to look for this pack which will be available soon in our TpT store!

 

 

We'd love to hear some comments about the free sample if you have a minute to leave one! We hope to see some of you next week at Best Practices! :)

What's In Your Cart for the TPT Teachers are Heroes Sale?

I'm one of those people that will buy something just because it is on sale whether I need it or not.  I just can't pass up a good bargain. That's why I'm so excited about the TPT sale . . .because there is always something on TPT that I need! Today, I'm linking up with Jenna at Speech Room News so I can find tons of bargains! Here's what's in my cart, what's in yours?

This basketball speech and language pack by The Speech Peach will be just perfect with March Madness about to start!

Also, take a look at our Silly Sentences for Articulation Practice and consider adding them to your cart :)  Our kids think they are a hoot and yours will, too!





 Your students won't mind practicing their /r/ sounds when making these silly sentences. Just divide the cards into a red stack, a yellow stack, and a green stack. Have the student pick one card from each stack, place it on the corresponding color on the sequencing mat, and practice saying a sound loaded /r/ sentence that will make everyone smile.



 

 

Heartbreaker!

Valentine's week is always a fun time in our speech classroom. All kids like to make, give, and get valentines, so incorporating valentine crafts is a quick, easy plan for therapy. Lately though, we've gotten burned out on doing the same activities year after year! Recently, I was looking for some fun, new resources online when I ran across a game called Don't Eat Pete! Many of you may be familiar with this game but I had never seen it before. After seeing this game, I started thinking of ways the game could be adapted to be a fun speech reinforcement game. I came up with this really simple game board and decided to call the game, Heartbreaker! While I thought the kids might like the game, I never imagined how much fun they would have playing it! We have had a ball this week and possibly the best thing about this activity is it can be played with Pre-K all the way through 5th grade (and maybe even beyond, our school only goes to 5th grade) with no adaptions needed! Our Heartbreaker Game is included in our Valentine Therapy Pack in our TpT store, but since this is the week for love and kindness, we wanted to share this game with you! Click the picture below to download the game and instructions. We hope you and your students enjoy it as much as we have!