I am excited to review my first "product" on my blog. This product is one that I have used since grad school and I use it every week in therapy now.
TheraSimplicity is a site that has many ready-made materials for SLPs. When I was in grad school, we had free access to these materials through our university partnership with the company. I have been using TheraSimplicity for about 3 years now within my practice and I'm still discovering activities I haven't seen before.
Some of the features of Therasimplicity that I love are the variety of photo images, colored clipart, and black and white drawings. These are great and readily accessible to be used with your students quickly. Therasimplicity's features also allow you to select images and it will create worksheets, slide shows, board games, and decks for you.
The website has materials for almost every person on your caseload including cognition, swallowing, speech, and language. There are ready made worksheets, parent handouts, diagrams, and more.
I find the site to be user friendly and full of useful materials. There are also video tutorials on how to use your subscription.
Some of my favorite and frequently used materials are for my articulation students. There are lots of worksheets, coloring pages, and activities that are a click and print away from your finger tips. My favorite is the "Sound Detective" series which has color and black and white printouts with pictures of target words hidden within a larger picture.
I could go on and on about the materials TheraSimplicity has to offer, but why not explore them yourself? TheraSimplicity offers a "Try Me" feature that allows you to explore all aspects of the website. You will be able to preview all the materials with a watermark on them. With all the materials offered, a yearly subscription of $49 is money well spent.
Note: Photographs are screenshots of the actual TheraSimplicity website and belong to TheraSimplicity. I do not receive any sort of compensation from TheraSimplicity, I simply love the product.
Starting this blog has been kind of terrifying for me. I love to read blogs and every blogger I read seems to have the most interesting life and I, well quite frankly, my life is pretty boring. I'm an average girl, not super adventurous and somewhat of an introvert with a very introverted husband. Take this last weekend for instance. We could have gone to parades or the fireworks to celebrate the 4th of July, but instead we hung out, made a nice dinner, and didn't leave the apartment for at least 24 hours. Oh, and we played video games.
While I am not a video game expert, I like to think that I am at least slightly nerdy in the fact that I have played (and beaten) a few video games. Our most recent adventure is a game called Terraria. At one point, I was really into Minecraft. Are there any school based SLPs who have no idea what Minecraft is? Do you hear your kids talking about it non-stop? I love the audible gasps that I get from students who have just figured out that I've played Minecraft and that I know what a creeper is.
While part of me feels that playing video games in my spare time is not adult-like, I enjoy how it helps me build connections with students, especially those students who tend to persist on a particular subject, such as Minecraft. When I can't seem to get a good language sample out of a kiddo, this topic usually yields very good results. Now don't get me wrong, bringing up the fact that I am a dabbling gamer can be dangerous. Sometimes my students won't stop talking about the game or they will try to convince me that we should play the game during our sessions. The cool part is that I know what they're talking about! I can't begin to count the number of times that I've been able to take a conversation with a student who is fully engrossed in their latest achievement in a certain video game and relate it to their goals. For example, in Minecraft, sometimes things don't go the way you want - you run out of materials to build a house, you drop your brand new diamonds into lava, or a creepy monster (called "mobs") starts to attack you. This allows me the perfect chance to bring up flexible thinking.
Minecraft is also a great discussion for cause and effect. Because you feed a wild wolf a bone, it loves you and becomes your companion. Now, don't get me wrong. I definitely DO NOT encourage my students to actually try this in real life, but you get my point. I can't tell you how many things I've read on being a great teacher that say you need to hook your students in by their interests. Overall, Minecraft is a pretty good game. While there are swords, you are fighting monsters, which is way better than fighting people in my opinion.
I hope to use Minecraft more in the future. Before writing this post, I discovered Pixel Papercraft, a website that has hundreds (if not thousands) of printable and fold-able Minecraft characters, mobs, and blocks. I'm planning to create some of these and use them in play or for role playing activities with students. Never played Minecraft? No worries - there is a free demo version available for tablets. Just give it a shot! Still not convinced? Here are a few things to know so you can understand "Minecraft-ese."
Minecraft is a game of surprise! mining and crafting. As you mine, you find bigger and better things, which allow you to craft, or make bigger and better things. There are many "recepies" online of how to build complex traps (hmm... that gave me an idea for following/giving directions). Minecraft is like a giant lego sandbox. Unlike games like Skyrim, Minecraft is a very block based game; everything has corners and a square shape.
Mobs - mobs are the monsters and include zombies, spiders, skeletons, creepers, and endermen. Creepers are green and explode if you get too close to them. Endermen are actually pretty creeper. If you look them in the eye, they teleport to you. Animals, such as pigs, sheep, horses, and cats are also considered mobs since they are randomly generated. Below is a picture of the most common hostile mobs. From left to right: skeleton, enderman, creeper, zombie.
NPC - an acronym for "non-player character" used in a variety of video games. These are characters that appear within games that are not contolled by humans, but simply programmed to be within the games.
Mods - not to be confused with mobs. "Mods" are short for modifications, or extra content you can download to change the look of the world or what can happen in a world.
Server - a server is basically a computer, or a special way to set up a computer. It's basically a place where data is stored, on a person's home computer, or someone else's computer. Servers allow people to play together at the same time, like a google doc, only way more fun.
Steve - Steve is the general basic Minecraft character. When you first enter a world, you look like everyone else unless you get fancy and download a skin. (Pictured right)
Skins - not as creepy as it sounds. Skins are just downloads that allow you to change how your character looks. I ask students to describe what their "skin" looks like.
Spawn - when a character spawns, they are entering the world. A spawn point is the precise location where your character will begin the game everytime you start to play that world, or will appear ("re-spawn") after your character dies.
A few of ways to target speech and language while talking about Minecraft include:
-following/giving directions
-describing
-social thinking/role play scenarios (don't be a zombie)
-working on language through play
-facts and opinions
-cause and effect
-narratives
-articulation, fluency, voice at the conversational level
-building a relationship with your students
And with that, I will leave you with this trailer created by a player and You-tuber that gives a basic preview of what Minecraft looks like and a few of the things you can do within the game.
When the trailer for Pixar's Inside Out, I became very excited. It was my hope that this movie could help me teach some of my students to understand feelings, particularly with understanding others' perspective. What I did not expect is how accurate this movie would represent depression and trouble with mental health. Don't get me wrong, the movie isn't perfect and many of the things are up for interpretation.
Inside Out is a story of an 11-year old girl name Riley who moves from Minnesota to California because of her dad's job. This move causes an uproar in Riley's emotions. Her emotions are represented by 5 characters - Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, and Disgust. Not only are these emotions in Riley's brain, but also in the brains of her parents, teacher, and other characters within the movie.
One unique element that my husband noticed was that in Riley's brain, each emotion is unique. In her parents' emotions and other adult's emotions, they mirror the person they represent. For example, Riley's mom's emotions all have glasses and similar hair-dos and one is primarily the leader. In the mom's brain, it appears that sadness is the "head emotion" and in the dad's brain, it appears that anger is in charge.
While the "anatomy" within the brain is highly inaccurate :-) , Pixar has created a way to talk about the brain and emotions in a very kid friendly format. The main five emotions are all located within Headquarters and control a mechanical panel of buttons and levers that impact how Riley acts and reacts to situations around her. Also located in headquarters are Core Memories, which are snapshots in Riley's life that formed her personality. Riley has several "personality islands" including family, hockey, honesty, and goofball.
After Riley's move, she goes to her first day of school. When asked to share something about herself, Riley begins to talk about hockey, one of her core memories. She starts off happy and full of Joy, but when sadness touches the core memory, she begins to cry, forming a new core memory. Up until this point, Joy has been the emotion in charge; after this new core memory is formed, Joy and Sadness get lost and sucked up a tube to a different part of the brain.
After Joy and Sadness are lost and out of headquarters, Fear, Disgust, and Anger are in control. Through a series of events, Riley's personality islands begin to crumble. As things continue to complicate, Riley's emotions begin to lose control of her actions. While not a perfect example of mental illness and depression, this part of the plot really spoke to me. Having some experience with mental illness and depression, the loss of personality islands was a pretty accurate representation for me of what happens to feelings and personality when depressed. When dealing with depression, you don't just lose all the happiness and Joy in your life, you also lose the other end of the emotional spectrum, Sadness. Most of us have seen the old Zoloft commercial talking about how you're not yourself when depressed, and I feel the personality islands crumbling help to show this in an understandable way.
Without spoiling the ENTIRE movie, the emotions learn that Sadness is just as important as Joy because it causes others to want to help Riley. I found this to be an incredibly touching lesson because often times we tell ourselves or others not to feel sad, but Sadness is a very important part of our lives. Fear, Anger, and disgust are also necessary.
To sum up, I loved Inside Out! I am excited to use the trailers, clips, and plushies to help my very literal students to visualize their emotions and others' emotions.
Another favorite part of the movie for me was the teacher's emotions. Maybe you can relate.
Figurative Language. Ugh, sometimes this makes me groan. In a K-8 school, I know that most of my language kiddos who stick with me into the older grades will be facing this within the classroom. Figurative language is particularly hard for students with language disorders because it's not concrete. Most of my kids hate the poetry unit, which is happening right now because April is poetry month. Picking out rhyme is easy, but then I start asking my students about words that sound made up and are hard to say: alliteration, onomatopoeia (that's hard for me to spell!), metaphor, hyperbole (or hyper-bowl as they like to say), simile, and personification. These are long words and hard to remember. I keep the definitions of each figurative langauge element on my wall for my students to quickly reference. I'd rather have them get the definition correct than guess 4 times and confuse themselves more. April 30th is going to be "Poem in Your Pocket" day at my school. As my 6th graders GROANed, I explained how Katy Perry's music is poetry and has example of figurative language and that got my students' attention. We started by talking through Katy Perry's song "Firework" which has examples of metaphors, similes, and onomatopoeia. I then asked my students about their favorite artists in order to create a new material.
Altogether, I used 42 pop songs to teach figurative language. By the end of a 2 week period, most of my students could identify similes, metaphors, onomatopoeia, and hyperboles. You can find the materials I made in my TPT store. I had alot of fun with this "Figurative Lyrics" unit and my students keep asking to do it again. I promised to revisit it, but we have more goals to work on in the mean time. :)
Some of the features of Therasimplicity that I love are the variety of photo images, colored clipart, and black and white drawings. These are great and readily accessible to be used with your students quickly. Therasimplicity's features also allow you to select images and it will create worksheets, slide shows, board games, and decks for you.
The website has materials for almost every person on your caseload including cognition, swallowing, speech, and language. There are ready made worksheets, parent handouts, diagrams, and more.
