However, that's not the way the universe always works. Instead its more like, "LOL." - The Speech Pathology Universe.
That's what happened yesterday. I brought two of my newest activities to therapy today, along with a new one I'm putting together- my Spring Grammar Scenes and Information Detective Game.
Oh dear. You know that look on a kid's face where you realize you're losing them? Eyes glancing side to side, trying to find an exit out of this activity that you've incorrectly assumed is appropriate for their skill level. Even after you trying to simplify the activity, they're still stressing and you feel like a big, fat failure.
Well, I'm not a failure. And neither is anyone else in my position. I just got a little too excited and tried to make something work that was not meant to work. Or just needed some modifying.
Now that I've implemented these activities, let me just say- I love them both. But in all honesty, here's what I learned:
"Information Detective" should be used with kids first grade and older and ideally with children who have basic reading skills. My pre-kindergardener had a hard time without visuals for the "clues" in the game, and has a difficult time with auditory memory which made the activity that much more difficult.
In using the "Spring Grammar Scenes", it may be helpful to separate the preposition visuals from the visual sentence structure. My kiddos had a little bit of difficulty finding the object on one page, then identifying the preposition visual and then plugging it into the sentence structure. Slight modification needed.
Moral of the story is, it is okay if your kid got more excited to color in a picture of a flower you took two seconds to print off than the extensive arts and crafts project you had such high hopes for. That's the nature of children. They like SIMPLE! They like cut and dry. I need to stop stressing out so much and trying to make things complicated.
In other words, K.I.S.S- Keep It Simple Stupid. :) And have fun!
Here's the activity I used yesterday that actually did hit a home run- I call it "Flower Power Superlatives"! It works great for targeting shapes, superlatives (biggest square, smallest square, etc.) and following directions. I would recommend it for late preschoolers onward.
It's free in my Teachers Pay Teachers store now!
Today I am linking up with Speechie Freebies again, be sure to check them out for more great downloads from awesome speech bloggers!
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