Building Successful Lives- Speech & Language Services: Guess What? SLP Lingo & Test Prep Vocabulary

Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Guess What? SLP Lingo & Test Prep Vocabulary

My speech-language therapy students are quite accustomed to me pulling out all sorts of vocabulary activities during their weekly sessions. I wanted a new way to help them practice saying the meanings of their key speech-language therapy and English/Language Arts words. So many of my students with language based learning disabilities struggle with verbally defining their curriculum vocabulary and many of them have memory deficits as well. After all, true mastery of a concept is when they can understand and explain the concept.

This was my motivation behind creating my Guess What? Frequently Used SLP Lingo & Test Prep Vocabulary Game. This is the 4th in this series. I wanted a fun way for my speech language kiddos to practice their curriculum vocabulary skills. This was an instant hit in my sessions!!!

To play this curriculum game, I select one semantic map from the set to focus on during a 30 minute session.

Research shows that the use of semantic or vocabulary maps is an excellent memory and learning strategy because it helps children successfully organize and retrieve information from their brains. Score! You can read more about that here as I did research on that as well when I completed my Education Specialist (Ed.S.) degree. http://bslspeechlanguage.blogspot.com/search/label/Brain%20Based%20Learning

Then I have each student in a group choose a mystery word and tell them to make sure they don't let the others see it!

Then I put the question prompts page on the table and a word bank.

I love the variety of visuals available in this game because it allows you to differentiate instruction without your kids even knowing it.
For example, some kids may just need the semantic map when it's their turn to ask a question while others will read directly from the question prompts page or another student will just need the word bank page to formulate his/her question.

Students will take turns asking their opponents a question to try to guess or figure out their mystery word. If someone guesses their word, they pick another word from the deck. The game continues until all the vocabulary from the selected semantic map are guessed.

My speech-language 4th and 5th graders absolutely LOVE this game and they get SUPER competitive too which I don't mind because they're practicing their learning objectives. This game will work well for middle school students too! There are 5 semantic maps with 40 Frequently Used SLP Lingo and 5 semantic maps with 40 Test Prep Vocabulary. Your students will have several weeks of language intervention to practice 80 words with this curriculum game!

You may purchase this product in my online TPT store here:
https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Guess-What-SLP-Lingo-Test-Prep-Vocabulary-1788007

I have three other Guess What? Curriculum Games in this series that are also favorites with my speech kiddos. They are available in my TPS store as well.

1) Guess What? Types of Literature, Story Elements, & Text Features