Back to School What's in My Cart

Ready or not, it's that time of year again . . . Back to School for the Best Year Ever! What better way to kick off your school year than with some fabulous bargains from your favorite sellers at TpT! Today we are linking up with Jenna at Speech Room News to tell you about some of the must-have items from our store and to let you know what items we can't wait to get our hands on during the sale :)

If you are looking for some activities to make your life easier this year, check out some of our print and go products. These products require no prep work, and they are all packed full of fun! Your students will adore them!



This product includes 15 mazes which can be used for articulation practice.
Included are picture mazes and word mazes that
target /r/ initial, /r/ medial, vocalic /r/, and /r/ blends.



This packet includes twenty quick articulation practice activities
designed to elicit numerous responses (and practice some math skills along the way).
Each activity can be used with any speech sound target.

This no prep, print and go packet contains 39 pages for practicing the early speech sounds /f,k,g,t,d,j/ from isolation to structured conversation.  Our students love these activities as they get to use a hole punch to complete each task. These pages can be used alone or as the perfect companion to our Early Speech Sound Ring-a-Lings. Use Ring-a-Lings to drill and then use a page to practice. These pages are great for increasing awareness, promoting generalization, and practicing at home.

Now for the items we have in our cart!

 

We are so excited about this homework packet from Kiwi Speech! So many useful activities!

We can't wait to use these language challenge sheets by The Pedi Speechie with our students!

 

This bundle by TLC Talk Shop is just what we need to keep our students involved!


Click the link below to go back to Jenna's page and check out what other SLPs are buying.  Happy Shopping!

 

 

 



Sweet Summertime!

Woohoo! Let the summer fun begin! We started our summer vacation off with a bang this year by taking a girls' trip to the beach. While we only stayed three short nights, we enjoyed lots of rest and relaxation. In fact, we had such a good time, we are thinking of making this trip an annual event. Below are a few snapshots from our trip.

Soaking up some rays with a good book :)

Enjoying coffee with a breathtaking view!

Getting ready for dinner at Captain Anderson's

Playing with Snapchat, lol!

We are also excited to reveal we are guest blogging tomorrow, June 5th, for the fabulous Nicole Allison over at Speech Peeps :).  Be sure to visit her blog to read about the unconventional way we stepped outside our four walls to make our presence known in our little rural community. We would love  to hear what you think about our wacky adventure.

Ok folks, now it's time for us to get back to enjoying our summer vacation! Hope you have a fantastic one, too!

Speechy Appreciation Sale Linky

Big thanks to The Frenzied SLPs for hosting this Speechy Appreciation Sale Linky :)  Even though our school year is winding down, we are still in the market for a good deal. Since the TpT Teacher Appreciation Sale is going on, we have decided we will show ourselves a little appreciation and pick up some resources to be ready to kick off our school year in August. If you are interested in doing the same, take a look at a couple of items we can't wait to get our hands on!

This bundled companion to Ned's Head by Panda Speech looks like tons of fun and it is low prep! 

These no prep Speech Seeks and Language Looks by our best buddy, The Speech Peach,
 are going to be perfect for all our students!

If you are looking for a great way to practice syntax, try our Morphology Ring-a-Lings that include targets for Plurals, Past Tense, 3rd Person Verbs, and Possessives. These drill and practice cards have been so portable and easy to use this year, plus hanging them on rings on pegboards has been a simple solution for storage problems.

Feel free to browse all our Ring-a-Lings Products in our TpT Store :)

We've enjoyed using our Ring-a-Lings so much that we developed some Practice Pages to go along with them! These pages are excellent for helping students generalize the skills they have learned during therapy and can be used with or without the Ring-a-ling drill cards.

The Practice Pages include targets for regular and irregular past tense verbs.

Don't forget to use the code "CELEBRATE" to save up to 28% off!  Happy Shopping!

Fun Flowers Lite App

Achoo! Yep, its that time of year . . . Spring is in the air! One of the best things about living in the South in the spring is the pretty flowers and trees that are blooming everywhere. Yes, that pollen is annoying, but those beautiful azaleas and dogwoods are worth a little sneezing now and then. There are so many magnificent colors outside right now that we have been inspired to center our therapy around flowers this week. We have found the perfect app, Fun Flowers Lite by TF World Software, to use with this theme, and we wanted to share it with you. What makes this app so perfect? First of all, it is free! Secondly, it has a variety of uses. Lastly, it can be used with a wide range of ages (we have used it with 3 years olds all the way up to 5th grade).

Here are some things you should know about the app. There is an arrow at the top of the screen that allows you to mute the game, clear the board, and change the background. It comes with a variety of backgrounds, but we prefer the grass. When you touch the background, a flower will grow. A quick touch grows a small flower, holding your finger on the screen, grows a big flower. When you touch a flower that is on the screen, it will disappear. The flowers grow in light blue, dark, blue, green, pink, purple, red, orange, and yellow. We have found that pink or purple are usually the colors that appear less often.

Here are a few ways we use the app:

--Allow the students to take a speech turn and then tap the screen to grow a flower. The first student to grow a pink flower is the winner. This is a great reinforcement game for mixed groups and allows the students to work on individual goals.

  --Have each student pick a flower color. The SLP fills the screen up with flowers. Then each student will take a speech turn and pick a flower that is the color he/she chose. The first student to pick all his/her flowers is the winner.

--Let your little ones be gardeners. Preschoolers just love growing the flowers and picking the flowers to make them disappear. This is also a great way to work on one-to-one correspondence.

--Work on basic concepts and following directions. For example, grow a big flower at the top of the screen, pick a blue flower on the left.

This app combined with our Flower Bundle has kept our classroom abloom this week. We even have enough activities to continue this theme for another week or two! Yay! Hopefully, you will also find some budding inspiration to get you through the end of this school year.

Available in our TPT store :)

Just a little glimpse of the fun we are having!

Achoo! Now, please excuse us while we go find our allergy meds.

Color Fun

Don't you love when you come up with a therapy idea and that idea ends up being a fantastic activity for all your students?! Last week we were brainstorming some themes for therapy and unfortunately nothing we discussed sounded good. For lack of another idea, we decided we would center our therapy around colors. After digging through our bin of color activities, we knew we had to do something different.

We created a color game that has turned out to be a wonderful activity for our language, artic, and fluency kids! We designed the gameboard (pictured below) which we also used as a homework sheet. We made a color dice on our SmartBoard and since we aren't always doing therapy in our classroom, we also made a color dice on our iPads using the Make Dice app.  When we were developing the game, we were really just thinking about it being a reinforcer - the student takes a speech turn, rolls the dice, and colors a picture that is usually associated with the color they rolled; but in the end, the game became so much more! When we started playing, we realized there were so many language opportunities available such as vocabulary building, identification, labeling, describing, compare/contrast, categories, and sentence formulation - just to mention a few. Not only was the game great for language, it created lots of speaking opportunities for the students to use their good articulation sounds and their fluency-enhancing techniques as well!

We are so happy with the way this activity turned out, we wanted to share the game with you.  If you don't have a SmartBoard or an iPad available to make a color dice, don't let that stop you! The low tech option works just fine. Just grab a sheet of paper and number 1 to 6. Beside each number write the color words: red, blue, green, yellow, purple, and orange and use a regular, old dice :)

Click on the picture and download it for free! Happy Coloring!

Triller - A great app for speech therapy!

During Thanksgiving my children were playing with a new app on my son’s phone.  They were laughing and having so much fun that I had to get in on the action.  I am so glad I did! We had a ball plus I found a new awesome activity for therapy! Yay! I tried it out today with a few of my groups, and it was a hit J

Triller is a music video app . . . Wait – A music video app for speech?  How does that work? Surprisingly, this app is a great tool for both speech and language therapy.  First I’ll explain how the app works, and then I’ll tell you how I used it in therapy.

The app comes with a wide variety of song choices, but the part I like best is you can choose to use songs from your own music library.  That way, you can be sure the song is appropriate to use with your students.  After selecting a song, you can record several clips and the app edits them into one really cool music video.

Now, how can a music video be used for speech therapy? Let’s start with artic. I gave my students a few songs to choose from.  After they selected one, we Googled the lyrics and picked out words that contained each student’s target sounds. After practicing the sounds, the students were ready to lip sync/sing the song and make the video. For language, the possibilities were only limited by my imagination. A few of the language concepts I addressed today included following directions, sequencing, predicting, inferring, and appropriate social interactions. 

The videos can be emailed, texted, or posted to social media sites.  They are a great way to incorporate communication with parents for individual students. I’m loving the videos my groups made and wish I could share them, but due to confidentiality, we just get to enjoy them together in the therapy room.

With permission, take a look at one of my adorable 1^st graders.  Taylor Swift’s Shake It Off was the perfect song to practice /k/ final in conversation!

 

 

Whenever you need a quick and easy therapy idea, the Triller app is loads of fun!

What's In Your Cart? Cyber Monday Sale

This year we've done almost all our Christmas shopping online.  It is so convenient and super easy to find what you want. You can also get the best deals that way, too! That's why we are linking up with the fabulous Jenna Rayburn again at Speech Room News to bring you the most convenient and best deals around for the Cyber Monday TPT sale :)

Thanks so much to Jenna for hosting this linky!

Here's what's in our cart for the sale:

Elizabeth's receptive and expressive language packet at The Speech Owl looks like so much fun! To make it even better, it's no print! Yay!

Love this no prep Christmas packet from Mandi at Panda Speech! So many great activities!

This whole body listening activity from Daria at Speech Paths looks so awesome and it is perfect for the holiday season!

While your shopping, please take a minute to check out these great deals from our store:

This bundled set of Morphology Ring-a-Lings includes our drill and practice cards for plurals, possessives, 3rd person verbs, and past tense verbs. This product also comes with sentence facilitating strips to help students produce sentence level responses. Cards include morphemes for /t/, /d/, /ed/, /s/, /z/, /es/ and irregular forms.

This set of Motor Speech Ring-a-Lings includes over 100 color drill and practice cards for apraxia and other motor speech disorders.

Levels include:
Sounds in Isolation
Reduplicated Syllables
VC Words
CV Words
VCV Words
CVCV Words (with changing vowels)
CVCV Words (with changing consonants and vowels)
CVC Words (with same consonant sounds)
CVC Words (with different consonant sounds)

This product also comes with 6 common, functional pacing board phrases, such as "I need help." and "Thank you." Cover cards for each level make these cards easy to organize. Each card is marked for ring placement for easy storage. 

This handy print & go packet includes 21 black and white, print and go articulation practice activities. Each activity is open-ended and can be used with any speech sound target. These speech sound practice pages are great for therapy and home practice and are designed to elicit numerous responses. There are 3 activity sheets for the following holidays: Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine's Day, President's Day, St. Patrick's Day, and Easter.

Thank you for looking! Happy Shopping!



5 Things You Didn't Know About These SLPs & A Give Away!

I was just sitting here scrolling through Facebook and ran across Jessica at The Speech Space's linky.  I enjoyed reading everyone's blog so much that I was inspired to join in the fun.  My sweet colleague and longtime friend and I share this blog so I thought I'd do a little twist on the linky and share 5 things you didn't know about us.  Here goes:

1.  Angela and I both attended Auburn University where we received our B.S. Degree in Education (Speech Pathology) and graduated in 1994.  Even though we graduated together, I am nine years older than Angela.  After completing 3 years of college, I decided I wanted to take a short break.  My short break turned into a long one, but I'm so thankful for God's timing. I can't imagine my life being any other way!



Throwing it way back to when we were right out of college! War Eagle!

This was from twin day.  Angela doesn't wear glasses but she put on a pair of mine for the pic.

2. Immediately after graduation, Angela and I were hired as school SLPs at a small school system in Franklin, Georgia; and we have worked together for the past 22 years.  There are only three SLPs in our system and we all share an office which brings me to my 3rd fact.

 3. We HATE to be cold! We keep our office nice and toasty!

4. We don't like ice cream, but we love chocolate :)

5. We both think families come first! Angela has two fantastic teenagers.  Trey just turned 17 and is the kicker for our region champion high school football team.  Sara Kate is 15 and is a varsity cheerleader and also competes on the award-winning Stingrays cheer team. Her husband, Ken, is a great guy who coaches and teaches P.E in our system.  I have three wonderful children.  My oldest daughter, Brittany, is a stay-at-home mom to my precious grandson, Tillman.  She's married to my son-in-law, Chase, who is a pharmacist. My son, Luke, is a site coordinator for Pine Cove Christian Camp and is currently attending seminary.  My youngest daughter, Meg, attends the University of West Georgia where she is a member of the tennis team. My husband, Rudd, (who is a great guy as well) works in Atlanta for Coca-Cola.

Angela and her family in Paris this summer.

Angela's husband and children.

Sara in action!

Trey under the Friday night lights!
 

 

\

My family at Thanksgiving last year.

My sweet hubby! 



Brittany and Luke eating at a food truck in Austin, TX

 



My youngest, Meg, with my grandson, Tillman :)

 

Sorry about the picture overload! Can you tell we love our families?

 

Now, how about a give away?! For a chance to win our Morphology Ring-A-Ling Bundle, comment below and we will randomly pick a winner on Monday, November 30th.

 

 

Be sure to visit Jessica Cassity at The Speech Space to learn more about other SLPs!  Thanks to Jessica for hosting this fun linky!





Get Fired Up for Fire Safety!

October 4 - 10 is National Fire Prevention & Safety Week and we are getting fired up! Because we understand the importance of teaching our kiddos about fire safety, we're planning our therapy for next week around this red-hot theme. While planning we found a smokin' website that we think both teachers and students will love! Sparky School House is a valuable resource for fire safety apps, lessons, games, and more. We're all ablaze over the app, Sparky's Match Game, for our little ones.  This fun match game teaches children what fire alarms look and sound like and what to do if they hear one. If you have older students who are burned out on the same old activities, check out Sparky's Brain Busters.  This app is even appropriate for middle school students.  It has many interesting facts and targets WH questions.

We were looking for some new 3 alarm activities to go with our theme when we ran across Teaching in the Tongass adorable Firefighter Clipart Bundle.  It was just so darn cute, we decided we would make a pack of our own to use.  Our Fire Safety Speech & Language Therapy Pack contains fun activities for speech and language practice and reinforcement.  These activities include a short fire safety story (for ipad or computer), story comprehension questions,  vocabulary cards,  defining and describing sheets,  interactive home practice sheets,  sentences with wh- questions, and a reinforcement game.  Click on the picture below to get a free sample from this pack.  This is one of our favorite sheets from the pack for a couple of reasons.  1) The students get lots of practice and repetition of their speech target and 2) It is so easy! No prep and low ink! This is a great go-to activity when you have too many irons in the fire and no time to plan :)

Last year we made a freebie SmartBoard Find the Fire Truck Game that was perfect for using with any skill.  You can still download this game for free if you didn't get a chance to get it last year.  Just click on the link to get this game for absolutely free! :) The students get "all fired up" when they find the fire truck and hear the siren alarm!

Ahoy, Mateys!

Yo, ho, ho! In honor of National Talk Like a Pirate Day on September 19th, we are linking up with Tracy at GoldCountrySLP to tell you about some fun pirate-themed activities for your therapy. We just finished planning, and we have tons of fun games, activities, and craftivities planned for our kiddos for the next two weeks :) Our Pirate Speech & Language Therapy Pack contains lots of games, activities, and craftivities including pirate facts, pirate jokes, vocabulary cards, and much, much more!


If you like using book companions in therapy, like we do, then be sure to check out our Pirates Go To School Companion.  Your students are sure to love the humorous pirates in this book by Corinne Demas and after reading it, you can use our book companion to work on listening comprehension, vocabulary, phonological awareness, comparing & contrasting, and synonyms.  Also included are a cute craftivity and a fun reinforcement game which can be used with any skill.

 



While your at TpT take a look at these adorable open-ended games by TLC Talk Shop! They look like a barrel of fun!

 

 

You also can't go wrong with these engaging pirate-themed Speech Seeks & Language Looks by our best buddy and buccaneer, the Speech Peach, and THEY ARE FREE!!!!

 

 

 

Make sure you visit Tracy's page by clicking the graphic below to see all the other pirate treasure available!

 

 

 



 

Thank ye for visiting our blog, Mateys!  Would ye like some buried treasure? Just click the link below for a no-print digital Treasure Hunt game!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4riMSha9kQscWdnTi1makpJVkE/view?usp=sharing

Fire Truck & Dalmatian Party Fun!

I read a comment on Facebook that made me start thinking.  It basically said something like, "Why do people go overboard for a 1st birthday party?"  Considering that my grandson's 1st birthday party pictures were just posted a few days before this comment, I felt a little offended :(  Rather than responding to the Facebook post, I decided to vent here.  While this post won't be the norm for what you will usually see on our blog, I hope you will see some cute ideas that might inspire you.

First, let me start with the comment that I really wanted to post on FB. "Tillman's party was a ton of work but it was well worth the trouble. I enjoyed the family time we all spent working on it. The look on his sweet face when the fire truck pulled up was priceless! He couldn't take his eyes off it. Little ones will only have one 1st birthday. Want a big party? Go for it! Or keep it sweet and simple. Precious memories, no matter what you decide to do."  With that off my chest, Let me share some of the details and adorable pictures of the party with you.

Maybe it does look like we went a little overboard, but I am happy to say my family is blessed with so many talented folks.  Tillman's other grandmother is an interior designer/wedding coordinator.  All the tables, tents, and chairs belong to her so they were no cost.  She also made the precious banner for his high chair. My sweet cousin makes children's clothing and she donated all the material for the table clothes and she made Tillman's adorable fire truck outfit and his Dalmatian bloomers.  I am super thankful for these family members who know how to sew, because I am sorely lacking in that area.  I made all the pennants, banners, posters, and printables.



Tillman's Fire Truck and Dalmatian Party - View from the Street
 



We decided to have cupcakes for easy serving.  I found a tutorial on Pinterest and made the cake stand to match the other décor.

Of course, we had to use party-themed food.  The menu consisted of "Hot" Dogs, "Paw-some" Potato Chips, Fire Flames (Cheetos), Fiery Fruit, Firehouse Chili, Cool Down Coleslaw,  and 5-Alarm Baked Beans. Menu cards were made on PowerPoint.
 

We ordered the puppies from Oriental Trading. I printed a thank you note to tie around each puppy's neck.

 

I made the centerpieces using tissue paper and graphics I designed on PowerPoint.  The Dalmatian and the fire truck were created using shapes on PowerPoint.  Thanks to Creative Clipart and KG Fonts for the other clipart and fonts seen in all the pictures.

 

 

I used scrapbook paper and card stock to make this banner.  Thanks to Angela (my colleague, best buddy, and TpT store co-owner) for teaching me how to cut letters and artwork freehand :)

 

The birthday boy with his smash cake and high chair banner made by his other grandmother.
 

You can't have a fireman party in July without a fire extinguisher!

At the last minute due to the heat, I decided to make a water blob for the kiddos to play on.  It was a royal pain but all the kids absolutely loved it.  I found the tutorial on Pinterest and the next one I make shouldn't be as much trouble since I learned from trial and error.  I also found a cute little puppy sprinkler (which I forgot to make a pic of).  It was beige and brown so I spray painted it white and painted on black spots to make it look like a Dalmatian.  Needless to say, it was popular with the younger party-goers.
 

The firemen were so awesome! They brought gifts for the children and let them go inside the fire truck :)

Here is Tillman and his Grandpa (my hubby).  I wish you could see more of his cute outfit!

Thank you for letting me share my pictures with you! I had so much fun helping plan, organize, and make this party happen!  I am truly blessed!