Thursday, January 8, 2015

Target Final Sounds and Asking WHO Questions


For several of my groups in speech therapy today, I used the Penguin and Polar Bear "I have, who has" Game by Jennifer Drake at Crayons and Cuties in Kindergarten.




Jennifer's free version targets the short 'a' sound, but we used it to work on articulation, ending sounds, asking "who" questions and formulating sentences with "I have". 

The game is played by passing all of the cards out, divided evenly between players. As I passed them out, we did basic vocabulary to identify the pictures and make a sentence with the word to check for understanding. The person with the "start" card begins the game by saying, "I have start. Who has, ..." All of the students look at their cards to see if they have the named item. If they do, they respond, "I have___. Who has___?" The game continues until the last card which says, "This is THE END!"

It took a couple of rounds for my language kids to get the idea of the activity. 
I held my hands up and OVERLY exaggerated the "WHO" when modeling. To identify the "who" I pointed to them and repeated the question for the 'asker' to also answer for comprehension of what we were doing.

Even though not all of my kids are readers, they are able to recognize letters and know sound/letter correspondence. So if the word they were looking for (because there is not a picture on the "I have" portion of the card) started with /k/ sound, I would ask them to find a word that started with /k/. Even my completely NON readers were able to do that.

What was nice about the activity was that my articulation kids got it right off the bat and were able to model for my language kids yet focus more on their sounds. The language kids ---struggled--- but after a few rounds and LOTS of modeling were SO excited when they were successful. You could see it just clicking in their little eyes!