Oral and Written Story Retell: Turkey Trouble

This year, I discovered a new fiction book, Turkey Trouble by Wendi Silvano. It is an excellent book that is perfect for students to practice retelling stories in speech language therapy lessons, special education resource classrooms, or regular education classrooms as well. 

Today, three of my groups did a picture walk with the story by looking at the pictures to gather ideas about what the story would be about. Then, we listened to the audio book and each student had their own book to actively engage in the story as it was read aloud. Next, I asked questions about the story and modeled orally retelling the story. After that, each student had a chance to verbally retell the story by expressing the characters, setting, sequential events, and why the main character did certain actions in the story. 

This is a captivating story about a turkey on Farmer Jake's farm who disguises himself in different animal costumes in an attempt to not be captured, slaughtered, and cooked for Thanksgiving Dinner. There is a delightful end of the story that you will have to read for yourself! 

Here is a picture of my students actively writing their story summaries after practicing their oral summaries. 

I played classical music while they wrote and they were truly working with minimal need for redirection. I was pleasantly surprised that I had 1 group of students with Mild Autism and 2 groups of students with SLI and SLD actively engaged in writing in my speech language classroom! With my ASD morning group, I wrote a written summary while they wrote as well. I believe that it is important to model all expected tasks for students to increase their task initiation and successful completion.

Here's a picture of the summary I wrote this morning. 

This was definitely an awesome lesson! On their next session this week, they will complete a turkey arts and craft activity on the other side of their summaries. I am going to make copies of their completed work to keep as a work sample. They will get to take their original home for further oral language practice at home ...hopefully when they share with their family. 


Thanks for visiting my blog!

Tamara

Fall Snapshots in the Speech Language Therapy Room

This fall season, I created a game board to use with a multiple meanings (homographs) vocabulary lesson and it was an instant hit in my therapy room. My students have asked to play this game repeatedly over the past several weeks. I used the game board included in my multiple meanings unit and cut out the individual pictures to create a larger board. 

I used this with the multiple choice questions in my language unit as well as a variety of other speech-language questions to target the specific skills that my groups needed to practice. My students took turns answering questions and rolling the dice to move along the game board. Here is a snapshot of 18 out of 30 questions included in this part of the unit.  

Here is a snapshot of the multiple meanings mats that my students used to match vocabulary cards with the correct definitions. I modified this game by placing all the matching mats on the table and then my students took turns selecting a word and searched for the correct definition to place the card on. My students enjoyed playing this as a scavenger hunt activity as they had to take their time to skillfully read the definitions on various mats to find the correct match. I assisted them with orally decoding words that were difficult for them. I was pleased to see my students improve their independence with this activity after the initial time implemented in a language therapy session. 

You can find this resource here in my TPT store available for purchase: http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Fall-Themed-Multiple-Meanings-Vocabulary-Homographs-919412

Thanks for visiting my blog today,

Tamara