Boo!

Notice the iPad--front and center, opened to the Pictello app.

Ghosts, iPads----we had a fun-filled Friday!   We love Halloween time at Ephesus (even though we are not really supposed to be talking about it).  Halloween characters lend themselves to craft projects, read alouds, adapted books, and fun.   Kids find activities centered around Halloween reinforcing, and they talk more. In the speech/language field, that's what we want!  

Here was my day.  The kids listened to, and interacted around a book downloaded from Tarheel Reader. For those of you who are interested in adapted books, or custom-made online books with simple language, Tarheel Reader is great!  I look for topics of interest, and then download as a powerpoint.  I print it out, and make velcroed boardmaker icons that the kids can match.  The name of this particular book was Orange Pumpkin, which was modeled after Brown Bear, a very familiar book. I can't claim to have written it---some other clever SLP did. During therapy,  I was looking for at least two word utterances to label the pictures.  (These children are in a separate EC classroom, in case you were wondering the level.)

After Orange Pumpkin story,  the boys in my little group (which is pictured at the top of this post) made cute little ghosts out of lollipops, tissues, and pipe cleaners.  For this, the amazing app, Pictello, provided step by step pictured and spoken directions.  After the assembly, I went back and just showed the pictures to the boys to see if they could provide the sentence to go with each step by step.  They did a great job!  Simple questions were answered, and when they couldn't answer the more complex questions, fill-ins and scaffolding helped.  The next step will be for them to use this activity as a springboard for a simple writing activity. 

These next few pictures are screenshots from Pictello.  There is a nice text to speech feature, so the directions are read to the children.  They love this!  

Hurray for Halloween!

This posting was linked on The Classified Mom and No Time for Flashcards