Wednesday, December 10, 2014

What's outside my classroom for Christmas? A WH question tree of course!

I am fortunate enough to have a classroom right next to the bathrooms. This placement potential is huge I tell ya! The teachers I work with are so dedicated to their instruction time that they use any transition time as an additional learning opportunity.

My first year on this campus, our reading specialist had a word wall outside my door. Every day I would sit in my room and marvel at the fact that the teachers were having the kids learn sight words while they were waiting on their friends to get a drink and use the restroom. Genius!

So as I began spending more time at my school, it became my goal to put speech and language worthy activities out there to not only teach the kids basic language skills but to help the teachers identify which kids can and can't do what. 

This month, while searching for Christmas freebies on TpT, I came across a fabulous WH question activity made by Elise Onur. 

After using it in my speech room over a few sessions, I placed the ornaments around a handprint tree outside my door. 

I used the more basic questions first. After this week, I will add the WHYs in there and REALLY give them something to talk about! 

It makes my heart so happy to be sitting at my desk billing Medicaid or writing IEPs and to hear teachers outside my door encouraging and modeling good language skills for their entire class. You can even learn language in line for the restroom!