Showing posts with label bowling. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bowling. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

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. 





Friday, September 14, 2012

Lesson planning fun!

I've caught the lesson planning bug. I'm almost worried that my first few therapy sessions will be super cool and then I'll lose excitement and be the worst SLP ever. But, so far, lesson ideas just keep coming.

I've been bouncing ideas off my friends and pinteresting up a storm. I love the idea of collaborating for lessons... you just get such good ideas that way. So lately, my friend Holly and I had been brainstorming together about using kid bowling sets in our sessions. My only concern was finding a kid bowling set that was cheap and cute. Well, today I was at lunch and Holly sent me a text: "They have bowling at white elephant! $12!"

I turned to my boyfriend and exclaimed, "We gotta go!" So we raced down to the store and met up with Holly. And I got the last bowling set!

Moral of the story: brainstorm with friends, pinterest, and stop everything to get to the best deals.
Here is the adorable bowling set 
                                                                              
There are so many ways to use the bowling in therapy, just add velcro and go! 
Some ideas:
  • Add a sight word on each pin. When the child knocks over the pin they have to identify the word. 
  • Velcro a spelling word to a pin. For each pin that is knocked over, the child has to spell it aloud and then write it on their bowling worksheet. 
  • Use as a fun, non-educational reward for good behavior
I'm planning on using my new set within the next two weeks so I will post more ideas and pictures as I figure out the lesson.