Bowling for Words

Nothing makes me feel better than to check another thing off my to-do list, so instead of being a Negative Nancy all night (just for that lovely post) I decided to get some work done. 

I have a therapy session again tomorrow. Since I'm still trying to see what my child knows, I have to run some more assessments. However, probing spelling patterns & morphemes is so boring. And if it is boring to me, I can't imagine how the poor kid feels. 

So once again, I started my brainstorming ways. I knew after yesterday that I would need to figure out my client's knowledge in regards to past tense -ed. There were a few misspelled words on his science experiment worksheet. But, how do you probe past tense -ed without just asking a kid to spell words. Well...

I was sitting in class this morning and came up with idea of using my handy-dandy bowling pins. Then I realized that I would need velcro to glue base words onto the pins. So I called my poor boyfriend and, instead of even saying good morning, I hurriedly said, "Need velcro, don't have time, in class, gotta go." Poor Mark. 

Anyway, my plan is to have my client bowl and he has to change each word he knocks down into its past tense form. For example, he knocks down walk, so he has to write walked onto his bowling pin worksheet. 

Since I want to use these pins over and over again, I couldn't just velcro each card directly onto the pin. Instead, I cut up a page protector sheet and made little clear envelopes for each pin. I put the sticky velcro part on the pin and attached the fluffy velcro piece onto the clear envelope. Then I stuck the cards into each slot. To make the base word cards, I just cut index cards into thirds. 

Here's how the pins turned out

Here is the bowling worksheet I made. I had a bit of trouble putting a line in each pin for him to write the word so I plan to just draw it in when I print it out.