My Take on Pixar's Inside Out

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.

I hope you enjoyed my review of Inside Out!

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!

Communication Graffiti

It's better speech and hearing month! Whoo hoo! I love nerding out this month. A few of the things I tried this year include: vocal hygiene presentation for staff, all school BHSM newsletter, staff email blast with Identify the Signs webiste, and Communication Graffiti (pictured above).

I got the idea for a graffiti wall from Jenna Rayburn over at Speech Room News. Because I have such a teeny tiny room, I actually had my students color on the paper after it was taped to the wall. This got such a great reaction from my kiddos and even from other students. I had students who have no services come up and ask to draw on the wall. That made my kiddos feel pretty good about coming to speech. 

Here is the finished product, with my slanted writing for the "I can" statements we used to guide our lessons. Ta Da! (or Da Ta as I used to say).

As you can see, I have some pretty good artists in my speech/language groups.

With my wide range of kiddos all the way from K-8, the wall had a variety of activities on it by the end. On the left you can see a word list for /s/ and /z/ from a student, a category circle, some drawings of vocalic /r/ words, a 3 part story, and some facts about stuttering. Below are some additional stuttering facts, and an idiom.  

A few of the other things we did on the graffiti wall were drawing some Unthinkables, using the EET to describe different things, and draw actions. Overall, this is a wonderful activity and really gets the kids to think about why they are in speech/language sessions. I plan to do this next year and with a new classroom, I should have more space (I'll even have windows)!

This graffiti is truly a work of HEART!

Repurpose! Reuse!

Repurpose! Reuse! Recycle! I remember those words from recycling initiatives when I was younger along with those, "How can we save the Earth?" topics. My family didn't grow up with much money and we used old milk crates and ice cream buckets to store toys. Thanks to my mom, I have found some really creative ways to store things within my speech/language space. I thought I would share some of the ways I reuse and repurpose containers for storage. Re- a prefix meaning back or again! (Love those prefixes for my middle schoolers).

Here's a bunch of my repurposed containers.

One of my favorites is an old parmesan cheese container that I use to store chipper chat chips (and there's alliteration!). This is by far my favorite repurposed container. I can shake out the chipper chat chips super easily from the "pour" side and putting them back in is as easy as unscrewing the lid.

Another of my favorites is an old animal cracker container covered in paper. Wow is this thing versatile. I use it similarly to Ned's Head or play "what's in the box" when working on describing or making inferences. The only problem is that you need to eat tons of animal crackers!

I typically use stamp cards within my room to earn prizes. For 2 of my students with ASD, this wasn't rewarding. So, I thought like Superflex! I knew they liked Pokemon and found some beading crafts. Now, they earn a bead for following directions, coming with me the first time I ask, etc. This is very motivating because when they are finished, we make the craft (plus there are about 60 beads per craft so it takes a long time). I use old spice containers because they are clear and small.

Last year, I got married and we received some brand new kitchen storage containers. Happily, I took the old ones to school and I now use them to store various game pieces (Candy Town from Speech Room News pictured here).

Because of our lowered printing budget, I like to print many of my things on colored card stock. Sometimes I get around to laminating them, but most of the time I don't. I put packing tape on the back of cards I will hang on my wall so that my blue sticky tack doesn't leave a stain or so that any masking tape doesn't tear off part of the paper. 

Other Items

• Pringles Can = Weekly PBIS ticket drawing bucket
• Hot chocolate mix containers = bins to draw cards, craft supply storage
• Ice cream bucket = bean bucket (it needed a lid!)
• Crayon Tin from the dollar store = pencil holder
• Tea tin = colored pencil holder
• Zibloc bags = the mother of all containers

What containers have you repurposed?

Lazy Day Therapy

While I can get creative with activities, sometimes I just need a break from thinking. Lucky for us as speech therapists, we usually have a stash of articulation decks. I even have decks of regular cards with pictures on them. these are my favorite because I can play regular card games with them and adapt them for speech therapy. Here are a few of my favorites.

Go Fish
Enough said, this is a staple.

Garbage
Use a 52 card deck with articulation/language words included. Deal 10 cards to each person with 2 rows of 5; keep them all face down. On your turn, you may draw from the top of the deck or the discard pile. The goal is to get the numbers Ace through 10 in order. If you draw a number (say an 8), you can place it in the 8th spot. Keep going until you can't replace any cards. Jacks and queens are "garbage" and need to be discarded and Kings are wild. The person to flip over all their cards and have Ace through 10 in order wins!
How to adapt: ask students to say the word on each card, say target words in sentences.

Just Guess
Use a 52 card deck with articulation/language words included. This game might seem familiar from the college days (ahem...). Hold the deck of cards. Look at the top card without showing the student. They are allowed to guess which value card you hold a total of 2 times. If they do not guess it right away, tell them if the card you hold is higher or lower than their guess. After the second guess, reveal the card. If the guesser was correct, the dealer must say the word on the card in a sentence. If the guesser was wrong, they must say the word on the card equal to the difference between their guess and the value of the card. For example, your student guesses 7, you indicate the card is higher and they guess 10; the card is revealed to be a Queen and your student must practice the word twice. When the student guesses the card on the first try, they become the dealer.

Crazy 8s
Use a 52 card deck with articulation/language words included. Try to get rid of all your cards. You can play any card of the same suit or same value as the one at the top of the pile. Eights are wilds and let you change the suit to anything you want.
If you don't have cards with suits, allow students to match the cards according to if the sound is at the beginning, middle, or end of words.

War
Use a 52 card deck with articulation/language words included. Deal out all the cards. No one is allowed to look at their cards. All players turn over the top card of their piles and put them face up in the middle of the table. Whoever has the highest ranking card takes both cards and adds them to the bottom of their pile. When 2 cards of the same value are revealed their is a "war." Players take 2 new cards, one face down and one face up on top of the cards in the middl. Whoever has the higher ranking face up card wins all the cards in the middle. Keep going until one player has obtained all the cards.

Memory
Shuffle the cards and spread them into rows face down. Try to find the most matching pairs while practicing your target for the day. When you find a match, you get to go again.

Spoons
Use a 52 card deck with articulation/language words included. Each player is dealt 4 cards. You may only have 5 cards in your hand at a time. Place plastic spooks in the middle of the table, one for each player minus 1. The dealer starts play by looking at the top card, deciding if they want to keep the card, and then passing along cards they don't want. When a player collects 4 of a kind, they grab a spoon. All the other players try to grab the remaining spoons. Whoever does not get a spoon loses.
Sometimes I'm afraid of students grabbing, so I have students put their finger on their nose and play "pig" instead. The last player to put their finger on their nose loses.

Golf
Use a 52 card deck with articulation/language words included. Place 4 cards face down in front of all players. No one may look at their cards. Before beginning play, each player may peek at one card once. On your turn, you must either draw the top card of the deck or the top card of the discard deck. If you draw a card, you may use it to replace one of the 4 cards in front of you, but you are not allowed to look at your cards before deciding which to replace. Place the drawn card face down and you must discard the card which was replaced. Each numeral card scores face value (Ace=1, 2=2). Jacks and Queens score 10 points. Kings score 0 points. The player with the lowest score at the end of the game wins.