If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.

This week’s book: If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. There are a lot of materials and ideas out there, but wanted to share a few that our program made this week/some tools we loved having for our hour-long speech/motor/social work group. Click above for the SMARTBoard activity my co-worker Kristin and I made. We put a little more effort into this one—hope you enjoy! Focuses on vocabulary from the book and following directions (can make as simple/challenging as you want). Click above also for a sequencing visual (helpful for preK kids starting to retell stories/working on slow, smooth speech/artic targets during less structured tasks). Here are the visuals from the story (part I, part II).

Some photos from our large group activities are below. We read the story and then split into three groups. One group went with our social worker and used the Toca Tea Party App. Another worked with our occupational therapist, rolling out play doh and using cookie cutters. My group used the Cookie Maker app, which is free! I’d highly recommend it. Awesome for following directions and sequencing. The visuals are great—can really see the dough getting mixed and flattening as you roll it, etc. There’s a donut version that looks even better/more complicated (to use with If You Give a Dog a Donut?). Once the kids had all been through each station, we had snack. Was it a healthy snack? Um, no. They each got an oreo cookie and a chocolate chip one…and then—after a taste test—got to pick one more of whichever was their favorite (hey, calories for the sake of answering wh- questions ;-D). After snack we played “Who Stole the Cookie From the Cookie Jar” (always a favorite, no matter what version…chicken nugget from the Happy Meal, syrup from the pancake stack…).

I love all the Laura Numeroff/Felicia Bond books, but the original does the cause-effect relationship the best! Great story for preK.

Round-Up.

Just a couple of follow-up materials/visuals from the week.

I wound up printing/laminating/velcro-ing the “Where are the pancakes?” sheets I made. It was great for my large and small groups. First gave students a direction (e.g. Put the pancakes on the pig) and then let them pick where to put the pancakes, asking where they put them (checkin’ in on their expressive language). We’ve also talked about different rooms in the house before, so it was a nice extension of that (note to self: add a bathroom, as the pig takes a bubble bath in the story!).

I think the kids really enjoyed putting the pancakes in ridiculous places. I’ll deem it a win, as long as I don’t hear from disgruntled parents whose children dumped pancakes in their beds or threw them at the ceiling. 😉

On the Synonym/Antonym front, here’s a little follow-up worksheet I made to go with the powerpoint presentation.

I’m more or less done with therapy for the week—-but with progress reports due tomorrow I have a long night ahead (and lots of evaluations + parent meetings tomorrow). Ah, the other side of speech-path life. Time to get going!

Please always feel free to request materials on a certain sound or area in the comments or via email—-want to make sure this blog is helpful for readers 🙂

Pig & Pancake, II.

I knew I should’ve waited until the end of the week! Well, I probably still should as it’s…Tuesday (I guess this week is feeling long? ;-D), but it’s more doable to dole out a few activities at a time! With our “book of the week” it seems like new, last-minute materials are always being whipped up to add a few minutes to sessions, target a different goal, or promote carryover. So—just in case you’d find them helpful—-here are a few more downloads. Hoping to print/laminate the “why” questions & answers later this week. I think just having this blog is inspiring me to create more materials, which is awesome. It has been wonderful seeing posts shared on pinterest and hearing of SLPs sharing the blog with their colleagues! I think it’s a great way for me to keep my materials organized and growing and—as long as someone else is benefiting from it—-it’s very worth it! Anyway—hope you have a reason to read If You Give a Pig a Pancake soon with your students.

Click on the photos below to grab the PDFs!

With some of my students I make up a simple cover and put together a little book of materials related to our story. Especially for some of my kids with older siblings, they love having some sort of “homework” or a “book” to read to their families!

If You Give a Pig a Pancake.

This week’s preK book is If You Give a Pig a Pancake by Laura Numeroff. Thought I’d just run through what we did for our motor/speech/language group! We started off by reading the story (targeted answering wh- questions and making predictions while reading). After that, we played a game my co-worker Kristin made: “Who stole the syrup from the pancake stack?” Each child gets a card (we put them, closed, behind the kids until it’s their turn) with either pancakes or syrup on it. We go around the circle chanting “Max stole/took the syrup from the pancake stack! Max stole the syrup from the pancake stack! Who, me? Yes, you! Couldn’t be! Then…who?” We always try to save at least one child with a syrup card for the end. We have made versions of this game to go with quite a few books/units (e.g. Who stole the cookie from the cookie jar? Who stole the apple from the apple tree? Who stole the Chicken McNugget from the Happy Meal? Who stole the acorn from the squirrel?).

Our occupational therapist’s fine motor activity involved a great game from Lakeshore (a teacher store): Flapjack Math. I put some pancakes on the griddle and had each child flip a couple over and tell us how many blueberries were on each pancake. We pretended to eat our pancakes when we were done.

After we’d mixed up our pancake batter (just mix/water/oil), with each child getting a chance to stir it up, we headed out to the SMARTBoard, where we targeted wet vs. dry (the pig is wet & sticky quite a bit in the story). Each student labeled an item of their choosing and told us whether it was wet or dry. Of course this can be modified for students who need more assistance: ask them to find a certain item, give them verbal prompts/choices, have them complete a sentence (This towel isn’t wet! It’s ____).

When we came back for snack, each child either requested syrup or said “no, thank you” and started scarfing down an animal-shaped pancake. We also always have a “question of the day”. Usually the kids vote on something, but as we’ve been doing this for a long time, today we mostly cut out the visual prompts and just asked what their favorite part of the book was. I offered up visuals from the story if any of the students needed help.

And…there you have it! Our hour-long group. Screenshot of the newsletter we send home for parents is also below. With my itinerant speech students I’ll be using the book this week to target a myriad of speech sounds (medial and final /k/or initial /p/ in pancake, initial /p/ or final /g/ in pig, etc) depending on their goals (click to download visuals). And here is a visual to use pancakes to target pronouns (I plan to practice with the first three visuals and then to use visuals of people from the iPad to elicit more utterances). All these books are great for working on “if/then”, cause/effect (easy visual here).

Enjoy!

P.S. Just stumbled across this blog post, which also has ideas for If You Give a Mouse a Cookie and If You Give a Moose a Muffin. Great minds—-they mention some of the same games/activities! Love all the ideas.

Articulation: /k/

With pre-K students, /k/ and /g/ are pretty frequent targets (“fronting”, or producing /t/ and /d/ in place of these sounds, is a fairly common error pattern). For some students, it “clicks” after seeing how to produce the /k/, auditory bombardment, hearing their own correct vs. incorrect productions, etc. For others, I’ve used a tongue depressor to move their tongue posteriorly, had them felt my throat/their throat, even laid down on the floor to let gravity take over so they can get used to what correct placement feels like. Since I see a lot of students whose parents bring them 1-2x per week for 30 minutes, I like to have worksheets to both use during sessions and to send home for carryover. Even my little three-year-olds will usually get some good practice in with a Bingo game/sentence strip activity/etc (haver finger puppets say the words for them? even better!). As you’ll keep seeing, I also like to use books as much as possible. I feel it makes the target sounds more meaningful—and often allows them to practice one word over and over without it feeling like drill (Reading “Where’s My Cat?” by Eric Carle? Point to them every time the word “cat” comes up. Heck, retell stories with stunning pictures to get the targets you need!).

So, below are some of the books I’ve loved to use to target /k/, and a bunch of the worksheets I’ve made. Most are pretty darn basic, but I know that, when I’m looking for treatment ideas, sometimes it’s just nice to have a few new activities to print out/utilize! Definitely will recommend my standbys for artic worksheets: Mommy Speech Therapy and the Materials Exchange at Speaking of Speech. And, while it deserves its own post, I wholeheartedly recommend Articulation Station for your iPad. Purchase sound by sound if you want, practice at the word/sentence/story level, take easy data, record in-session…I love it!

Books: Initial: Have You Seen My Cat? by Eric Carle, If You Give a Cat a Cupcake by Laura Numeroff, The Mixed-Up Chameleon by Eric Carle, Does A Kangaroo Have a Mother, Too? by Eric Carle, Medial: It’s Pumpkin Time by Zoe Hall, A Pocket for Corduroy by Don Freeman, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura Numeroff, 10 Fat Turkeys by Tony Johnston; Final: One Duck Stuck by Phyllis Root, Duck on a Bike by David Shannon (haven’t read, but want to!), Shark in the Park by Phil Roxbee Cox

Downloads:

Intial/Final /k/ “trees” (targeting consonant + vowel; vowel + consonant)

/k/ Initial Bingo (CV, CVC)

/k/ Initial Powerpoint (visuals + some sounds)

Initial /k/ “I Spy” (circle/say the target words in sentences)

Initial /k/ sentences (CV, CVC)

Initial /k/ and /g/ sentences (targeting correct voicing)

“Have You Seen My Cat?” by Eric Carle (various “cat” Boardmaker visuals)

“Mixed Up Chameleon” by Eric Carle (initial /k/ in multisyllabic words; sentences)

Medial /k/ in sentences

Medial /k/ “I spy”

Final /k/ activities (print, staple. word, sentence, story level)

If You Give a Moose a Muffin.

In our pre-K program, we’re lucky to run a weekly hour-long group that integrates speech/language/motor/sensory/social work. This means planning activities along with our awesome Occupational Therapists and Social Worker. We typically start with a book we all love and come up with appropriate activities from there. Since I also work with the itinerant speech students (mostly kids with just articulation goals), I usually wind up also making up articulation activities to pair with the books.

Last week’s pick? If You Give a Moose a Muffin by Laura Numeroff. We chose our books based on a handful of favorite authors/illustrators this year, so you’ll see plenty more related to Eric Carle and Laura Numeroff!

Other activities: We acted out the story while reading it (prop suggestions: muffin mix box, clothespins, handkerchief/sheet, plastic blackberries & muffins, button, moose) and acted out the poem “10 muffins on the window sill” with our little puppet theatre, a moose puppet, and 10 plastic muffins. For our snack the kids got to enjoy corn muffins! Question of the day: what is your favorite kind of muffin?

Below: SMARTBoard activity with book vocab/sorting home vs. school, printable book targeting prepositions (put the muffins different places), sentences with story vocabulary, sentences with medial /f/ (based off of/used with my favorite articulation iPad app: Articulation Station), medial /f/ Bingo.