What's In My Cart?

My cart is filling up fast.  I'm getting it ready for the big TPT site wide sale coming up this week!  Woohoo!  I love a good sale.  :)

Big sales like this one only happens a few times a year on TPT, so I like taking advantage of them when they do.  We are celebrating 3 million teachers on TPT (um...wow!), and you can take up to 28% off your entire purchase when you enter the code TPT3 at checkout. :)

Jenna over at Speech Room News is hosting a linky party for everyone to share what's in their cart!

Before I let you peek into my cart, here are a few items from my own store you might be interested in!

• Speech Therapy Task Cards for Articulation

• Lucky Bingo for Later Sounds

• Themed Worksheet & HW MEGA Bundle

• Common Core RtI Packs for K-2 and 3-5

Now, here's what I have ready and waiting in my cart...all set for me to click buy!  There are some amazing sellers out there, y'all!  Check em out!

~Catch a Leprechaun writing craftivity from A Cupcake for a Teacher

~Picture Prompts Descriptive Writing from Jodi Southard

~Ultimate Data Collection Binder for Speech and Language

~Perspective Taking: Photo Activities for emotions and reactions by Jenna Rayburn

Cute stuff, right?  Go ahead on over to SRN and check out the linky to see what's in everyone else's cart!  

Speech Therapy Task Cards for Articulation!

I'm so excited to share this new product with you.  It's something that has been super fun for the kids and helpful for me to make the best use of my time.  Enter: Articulation Task Cards!

Disclaimer: This post may contain Amazon-affiliate links for your convenience

Several of my teacher friends use task cards as early finisher activities in their classrooms.  Whenever a student finishes an assignment early, they just head to the card holder, grab a deck, and get to work!  I thought these would be great to implement in my speech room as well...not necessarily as an early finisher activity, but for anything!

I set out to make cutesie decks for articulation and loved them so much that I'm in the process of making decks for Common Core-based language skills and fluency skills as well!  So stay tuned!  :)

Check out my artic decks!

These are for later sounds and were made for kids that read, so there is just text on these cards.  There are 16 cards for each of these sounds: R, S, L, Sh, Ch, J, Th, and a generic deck that can be used for any sounds.  There are 128 cards included in all plus deck covers for each!

Each sound deck includes 4 different activities: movement, spelling, spontaneous sentences, and story telling.  The generic deck includes all sorts of different activities that are fun and engaging for the students.

These decks are great for independent practice in between turns during group therapy, to use as an articulation center, or even to use during quick drill activities.  I love them for carry-over practice too.  You can grab these at my TPT store HERE!!

I also wanted something cute to organize them all in my room.  After scouring pinterest for a while, I found that several teacher blogs have such fun ideas for holding them.  This one uses a flip flop holder, which you can grab on Amazon (like this one
Closet Skinnies Bronze Flip Flop Hanger by Beehive) or from Bed, Bath, and Beyond.

If you know me, then you know that I love to craft.  Sooo I was all set to make one of my own.  I attempted this one out of wires, ribbons, and clothespins:

It was cute and worked for a bit, but the decks kind of slipped off the clothespins, or the clothespins would slip down the ribbon sometimes.  I decided to admit FAIL lol.   So, I just bit the bullet went for the flip flop holder with sturdy hooks! :)

Much sturdier for sure, even though you can only fit 6 decks at a time.  :)  Anywho...I'm loving these decks and I hope you will too!

PS I've also recently made some Fluency Task Cards which you can check out HERE!

Lucky Speech Open-Ended FREEBIE

This product has come after several requests!  I'm so glad you are loving my open-ended reinforcement games that use real candies or snacks!  And because lots of you asked for a St. Patrick's Day themed one, this one's all for you.  :)

Lucky Speech was made to be played with real Lucky Charms cereal!  You could even use stickers, erasers, or even those little gold coins.

The game comes with 2 mats, clover number cards, and leprechaun wild cards.

I usually print out 3 number pages and one wild card page.  Students take turns drawing cards and collecting candies/objects as a reinforcement for any speech or language skill or card deck.  They really do love these and have so much fun with them!

You can grab this freebie at my TPT store HERE!  Don't forget to leave feedback and let me know how it's working for you!  :)  

S-peachy Feedback: February

It's that time again for a little giveaway!  I'm linking up with Nicole from Speech Peeps again to say thank you for your fabulous feedback!

Here's the feedback winner for this month...

A big thanks to TPT user lgriffin730 for leaving such great feedback!  It's great hearing what you specifically liked about the product and how it helped you!  Feel free to choose anything you'd like from my TPT store and shoot me an email at busybeespeech@gmail.com when you decide.  :)

Keep leaving that feedback and check back next month to see if you're a winner!

President's Day in the Speech Room

Happy President's day!  Did you have to go to school today like I did?  Or were you one of the lucky ones that got a little break?  Weeelll, I kicked off a week of President's day themed activities today!  Here's what's up my sleeve for this week.

• My President's Day Speech and Language Packet!

This packet is coming in so handy this week!  It includes a game board and lots of activities that address both speech and language skills including main idea, inferencing, predicting, comparing/contrasting, grammar, worksheets, and more.

You can even download the game board for free by clicking the preview button!  Find it at my TPT store here.

• Duck for President

I scored these cute mini-books from a Chick-fil-A kids meal a couple months ago, and I was saving them for this week!  It's a fun little fiction book that has lots of good vocabulary for my older kids, pictures for describing, and other good opportunities for summarizing and sequencing.

• Nonfiction articles from Readworks.org

Have you heard of Readworks?  It's awesome for finding short articles (mostly nonfiction) based on grade or lexile level with comprehension questions.  You can even type in a key word and search for articles about that subject.  These are perfect for a therapy session or even RtI.

I typed in "president" and printed out several stories for my kiddos across grade levels.

• Lincoln hat craftivity 

Here is the cutesie craft that we'll be doing in my speech room.  It's super easy and only takes a few minutes.  Check out our Abe Lincoln hat!

We just cut out a small strip of black construction paper and a large square.  Then we glued them together to make a top hat.  Pretty easy, right?

My artic students colored and glued little picture squares from a workbook to the hat.  It makes a great "blank slate" for whatever skill the students are working on, whether it's fluency strategies, writing sentences, vocabulary, etc.  They could write, draw, and glue anything on there.  ;)

I thought they came out pretty adorable.  My kids liked them anyway.  Well, that's what my week is going to look like.  Do you have any President's Day activities planned?  

Valentine Candy Speech {Freebie!}

It's Valentine's week!  We've got hearts and flowers and pink and red throwing up all over our speech room lol.  Gotta love it.  To add to your Valentine fun I've got a yummy new freebie for you!

Enter: Valentine Candy Speech!

This one is played just like my other yummy freebie open-ended games.  It's made to be played with REAL candy or, in my case, we used strawberry flavored heart marshmallows!  They LOVED it.

The game comes with 2 different heart mats,

Valentine candy number cards,

cupcake wild cards,

and a bonus say and cover heart game.

To play this bonus game I have the students say their word a certain number of times then cover a heart with a marshmallow.  For my kids at the conversation level, I gave them a marshmallow every time I heard them use their sound correctly.

The kids have been having SO much fun stuffing their faces with marshmallows and practicing their speech.

Grab this freebie HERE and don't forget to leave some lovely feedback!  I love hearing what you think.  :)

Therapy Fun Find: Olympic Craft!

From time to time I like to showcase a speechie product, craft, toy, idea, etc. that I've come across and found cute or useful for therapy.

For today's fun find and in honor of the Olympics starting today, I found this super adorbs Olympic-themed craft!  Check it out. . .

These are little Olympic skis made out of popsicle sticks from Icanteachmychild.com!  She attached upper and lower case letters, so preschool/kinder aged kids could match them up.

I think these matching skis would be perfect for artic words, synonyms, antonyms, words and definitions, etc.  You could even keep the letters and have the kids practice spelling and decoding skills!  The possibilities really are endless.

Anyway, you can find a whole tutorial on how to create these HERE at I Can Teach My Child website.  What do you think?  Cute, right?

Let's Be Social! ~ App Review

Recently, I had a new pragmatic student hop on my caseload.  Weirdly enough, I haven't had many students who work on social skills in my few years of working, and I realized I desperately needed some materials for this area.  When Everyday Speech offered for me to review their app Let's Be Social, I jumped at the chance.

Disclaimer: I was provided with a copy of this app, but the opinions are all my own. :)

This app allows you to teach problem solving, forming friendships, recognizing emotions, and predicting outcomes using 25 illustrated lessons.

You can choose lessons in 5 areas of pragmatic skills: personal interactions, navigating the community,  school behavior, handling change, and social relationships.

To get started, tap on the lesson you'd like to teach.  

You'll see a social story with a colorful visual.  Tapping "start" will bring you to questions for the student to answer about the story.  You can even add your own questions to the story.

The questions are multiple choice, and the responses are immediately reinforced as to whether they are correct or incorrect.

You also have the option to add your own lesson or skill set!  To add a skill set tap on "add skill set" on the left hand column and type in the category of skills you'd like to address.

To add a lesson in a given category, tap on the "add lesson" icon and create the lesson you'd want to add.  

After adding the information for the lesson, you are prompted to add the questions of your choosing.

Cool, right?  I happen to love this capability.  Once it's created, your icon is created and you can proceed through just like the rest of the social stories.

You can grab Let's Be Social from iTunes for $14.99 HERE.  

What I dig about this app:

• It's easy to navigate.  Prompts and labels are all throughout, making it easy to find and create what you need.
• You can add your own lessons and questions.  This is a biggie!  Not many apps have this type of capability.  Love it.
• The variety of lessons make it relevant for lots of different pragmatic goals.
• The price is very fair for what you are able to get out of this app.

What could make it better:

• It doesn't allow you to take data in-app.  This isn't that big of a deal for me, but I know it is for some.
• The stories are geared toward younger students, so I'd have to do a lot of story creating for it to work for my older kids.  
• I kind of wish some of the questions were more open-ended instead of multiple choice, allowing for more creative responses and expressive language practice.

What do you think?  Would this app help you with your social skills kiddos?  :)