This teaching strategy is brought to us by Virginia of Andover, MA. She is a Speech/Language Pathologist for students in Early Learning through 2nd grade. Virgina’s teaching technique is to engage her students in a creative adventure to put together a story of the sound or letter they are targeting in their lesson.
Her project: Creating Books for Super Articulation.
Using Target Sounds for the lesson, the students name a stuffed animal or puppet as the main character, such as Ricky Raccoon for ‘r’ words. Using a picture of Ricky along with others chosen by the students they build a book of Ricky’s likes, dislikes, activities, habitat, friends, etc. Each page starts with “Ricky the Raccoon…” This sense of adventure and creating is great for motivating articulation practice of /r/, as well as practicing sentence structures, asking questions making it a multisensory experience. Ricky and the book go home for practice with the student’s parents. Huge interest & success!
Her students really enjoyed this project and have a new one entitled “Lily the Leopard.” This book will incorporate not only /l/, but the vowelized /r/ combinations needed… ar, er, ir, or, ur.
Learning Objectives:
Practice of learned skills including: phonemic awareness, placement, production; syntax: organization/formulation of verbal expression; benefit of model/imitation of therapist and parents; and independent experience. The results are increased sound production and intelligibility from single words to connected speech! Great motivating lessons for articulation practice, intelligibility, and building confidence as an effective communicator.
Materials:
Pictures, construction paper, glue, laminate, markers/computer printed labels and sentence starters, and homework sheet, as well as a small puppet or stuffed animal that can travel home with the book for a week’s practice.
* * *
Brought to you by We Are Teachers partnership with PCI Education’s Teacher Grant Asks: http://www.weareteachers.com/ideas/partnerask/teachingidea?app=17630&grantId=75
I am one of those fialmies where the district did pay legal fees in excess of a million dollars rather than do what was right in the first place. If you ever would like to hear the story, I’d be glad to share. I love your blog and I love your honesty! Thank you!