Summer Speechin'

For those of you who work in schools, summer is either right around the corner or you are already enjoying the fresh air and sunshine. Summer break in my district starts on Thursday and I am so excited. My tiny closet of a speech room is heating up by the day and even with 2 fans, I'm having difficulties staying cool. Most of my treatment has been push-in this week to avoid dealing with kids having heat stroke.

As a child, I thought these breaks were for students; they're not. Breaks are for the school staff. I am so excited for several things. 1) No more super early mornings. 2) Time for naps. 3) Interviewing for clinic positions. Even though summer is almost here, my thoughts turn towards fall and how my kiddos will grow and fair over the summer.

Of course I could never just let my students go free for the summer. Luckily enough, several parents have actually ASKED for homework and returned it with their child over the past year. Maybe I've been doing the homework incorrectly, but I rarely receive the homework back after it's been sent home.

My new favorite version of "homework" is to give students a "homework word." This is something related to articulation, a vocabulary word, or our high stakes testing vocabulary word of the week (from Natalie Snyder's High Stakes Testing - vocabulary builder). I love how this works. The idea of these homework words are to pick words that the student uses on a regular basis and challenge them to use their awesome speech skills with it. For example, one of my students has been working on his /s/ sounds all year. With his input we picked homework words like "Sonic, Sega, super, and awesome," all staples of his daily vocabulary. WOW! I did not expect how well this would work for this student. Before I knew it, he was using his /s/ on these words in every day conversation. He even started to ask what his homework word would be. I started using this with other articulation students with great success and began expanding it towards my language and social skills caseload.

Unfortunately, I can't give my students weekly words or concepts during the summer break. Here comes the summer homework packets! Just a few of my favs.

Articulation
-{FREE} Summer Articulation Homework Calendars from School House Talk
-{FREE} Summer Packets and Parent Letters from Speaking of Speech
-{FREE} Pictures from Mommy Speech Therapy
-{FREE} Speech Minute Calendar from me

Language
-{FREE} Summer Language Homework Calendars from School House Talk
-{FREE} Editable Life Science Vocabulary from me (middle school)
-{FREE} Editable Earth Science Vocabulary from me (middle school)
-{FREE} Editable Prefix/Root/Suffix Vocabulary from me

There are so many more, but these are FREE for anyone. Happy Summer!