It's no secret that I love toys and including play into my therapy sessions.  If you haven't already downloaded my FREE Play-Based Speech Therapy Homework you can download it HERE ! One toy that I use often but have never really included is a shape sorter.  Sometimes this one may seem a little "babyish" but I am always surprised by my kiddos who want to play with it.  This toy can be used to target many language goals and I thought I'd put together a little list of ten goals you can target with a shape sorter. I usually bring it out with my Pre-K-Kinder population or my younger students who have autism. Please know these are just general ideas, really the possibilities are endless and you may need to adjust to what your student needs. Here are some ideas of how to use a shape sorter to target language skills!  First is obvious, naming or identifying colors.  Now with this particular sorter, I am limited to five colors but usually, that is a good number to ...
My 3 year-old has recently become interested in letters so we are taking this opportunity to expose him to all things alphabet!  I had a lot of these toys/materials for my oldest and it's fun to bring them back out.  Here are some of our favorite alphabet toys for little learners! First up are magnetic letters.  I bought these letters HERE from amazon.  I pair them with a $1 cookie sheet from Dollar Tree and the Magnetic Letter Template from Just a Primary Girl.  We work mainly on just matching the letters by placing them on top, but we will also name them as we go.  Still using the cookie sheet,  we play with alphabet magnets from Target!  These are several years old so they are no longer available but I would check the Bullseye Spot soon for all the new back-to-school items.  There may be something similar.  This is a new toy for us, the Leap Frog Mr. Pencil's ABC Backpack .  I bought this as an Easter present for the letters but also for the magnetic w...
Want an easy way to send practice to your students?  I share my cards with my students by using a "fast pin". Sharing a boom card deck with a fast pin is almost instant for families and students to practice!  I am going to share the steps to sharing a fast pin today.  The only downside to sharing a fast pin (instead of assigning decks through your classroom on Boom Learning) is that their accuracy will not be recorded.  If you want the student's accuracy to be recorded they will need to create a Boom Learning Account, you would need to add them to your "classroom" and assign the deck that way.  I don't go this route because I have found it's too many steps for my families and I am not interested in keeping accuracy during home practice. I have been sharing my Articulation Cards with my students/families exclusively through fast pins, here's how!  Step One: Go to your Boom Learning Library.  I am using my iPad to show you today but you could ea...
March to May were the most difficult months of working as a speech-language pathologist that I have faced yet.  We were thrown into teletherapy (something that I had never done before) and were figuring it out as we went.  I learned a lot and wanted to share seven of my "Teletherapy Must-Haves" that I found helpful while working as a teletherapist.  This list includes the materials I found to be "must-haves" besides the obvious things you would need to conduct teletherapy (ex. internet, a computer, web camera, digital platform, etc). Now of course I am completely biased to these things because many were made by me and you could definitely provide teletherapy without them but they made sessions so much easier for me and my kids. If you are just starting out with teletherapy or still feeling lost I am hoping this will give you some ideas! So here we go, in no particular order (except for the Osmo, that was definitely my favorite!).  Also,  almost every picture in thi...
I have found some great teletherapy resources in the last few months but I am still missing all the games from my speech room.  Now that I have figured out how to use my Osmo as a document camera I thought this would open up the possibilities of using some of my games during teletherapy! I went through my games and came up with six games/activities that I can play while screen sharing.  I have tweaked some of the instructions just a little to make it work and some I changed up the rules to help be more specific in targeting goals. Here's a collection of six games to screen share during teletherapy!  Rory's Story Cubes These little cubes are great for so many language and articulation goals!  You can target naming/identifying pictures, using verbs, self-monitoring articulation skills, producing grammatically correct sentences, generating a narrative, and telling a story using sequencing skills just to name a few.  While I was sharing about these cubes Hanna from My Lit...
Over the school closure, I updated my Literacy Handouts for Parents (I have not yet updated the Spanish version).  They're still FREE!!  I hope they're helpful! You can click on any of the pictures below to download the handouts. Here are some pictures of what's included in the file. ...
Let's talk a little about teletherapy!  This past spring was a huge adjustment for me with switching to teletherapy (which I had never done!) and I worked really hard to turn some of my face-to-face activities into digital activities.  Boom and Books was born! ...