When I started therapy with this year's group of kids, I discovered we had one thing we needed to work on first: Making a sentence. Not only for the language delayed kids, but also for my ESL and articulation delayed kiddos, making sentences was not an easy task. I tried modeling, written and visual prompts, more modeling with no good carryover. How hard IS IT to remember the word "THE" and the word "IS" and stick another word in there that is pictured?!? Evidently more so than I EVER thought possible.
I was frustrated, they were frustrated and NO ONE felt successful.
So back to the drawing board I went. I wanted to make an activity that used descriptive language because with adjectives, most things can be interpreted. Those special little words make the statement, "I want that." which means absolutely nothing to me, into a BETTER statement, "I want that big, round thing." Right?
For whatever reason, (maybe because they are four and five), my students LOVE animals. They want to pretend to BE animals, make animal NOISES, play with animals and so on. So six animals were chosen and more than 30 words were written onto strips. We made silly sentences, "The dinosaur is ugly. The mouse is sneaky. The alligator is fat." We matched antonyms, synonyms, and learned a few new vocabulary words. Some of my groups were even linking together TWO words in ONE sentence before their time was up: "The dinosaur is loud AND tall." This made my little speechy heart swell!
Since I went to all of the trouble to make this activity, I went ahead and posted it as a FREEBIE on my TpT store.
My sentence strips were not working for what I had imagined so I just took the advice of a fellow #InstaSLP party SLP and wrote the sentence on the table!
The kids gasped but quickly got over it and got back to the activity. One thing that I kept saying OVER and OVER today that I am going to get busy making a visual prompt for was, "Think about Speech". This activity got them REALLY talking which made it difficult to hear everyone's responses. The verbal cue worked really well so I am going to work on making that one into a visual. Since this age group cannot read, I would have to tell them the word (adj) when I gave it to them and they would have to remember it and recall it in their sentence orally when it was their turn. If they were too busy talking about their grandma's dog eating a chicken.....well....let's just say they didn't remember the word or sentence order when it came to their turn!
If you notice the word "SICK" in the photo above, the /s/ is yellow and the /k/ is red. I made a "Key" in the instructions and color coded the words for a quick cue to ME which adjectives I wanted to give the articulation kids so that I could hear their good speech sounds as well.
I hope you enjoy this sentence construction freebie! Leave me feedback and I can adjust it or make it into a full unit for future therapy sessions.
Wait! Let's look at this affiliate link :)