Get Your Laminating Equipment Ready!
By Judith Maginnis Kuster
Perhaps you are starting a new job in a school setting next fall and have no equipment budget and very few treatment materials in your files. Or perhaps you are a veteran clinician and your equipment budget has disappeared with the budget cuts and you would like some new materials to start off the school year. With a color printer, scissors, card stock paper, and laminating equipment, you can spend a few hours this summer and create many wonderful treatment materials inexpensively. Explore the sites below for additional materials besides those highlighted.
The DLTK site (www.dltk-kids.com/) has materials that can be downloaded and adapted for speech treatment such as:
- "Memory games" (www.dltk-cards.com/memory/index.htm) can be customized to pairs of 6 or 12 pictures for activities such as "Go Fish" or "Concentration."
- "Dominoes" include several matching and vocabulary building opportunities (www.dltk-cards.com/dominos/index.htm).
- "Bingo" allows options of 3X3, 4X4, or 5X5 cards for different skill levels and a variety of different themes. The colors/shapes option would provide an interesting speech-reading activity (www.dltk-cards.com/bingo)
- The Very Hungry Caterpillar (www.dltk-teach.com/t/books/csequencing.html), Brown Bear Brown Bear What Do you See? (www.dltk-kids.com/books/brownbear/index.htm), and Polar Bear Polar Bear What Do you Hear? (www.dltk-teach.com/books/brownbear/sequel.htm) can be made into felt board activities for sequencing and carryover practice.
- Sentence sequencing (www.dltk-teach.com/alphabuddies/sequence/sentence.htm) allows children to practice combining parts of speech to make sentences.
The "Materials Exchange" on Pat Mervine's speakingofspeech.com is packed with downloadable colorful PDF files including activities such as rhyming words, minimal pairs, categories, vocabulary and articulation flash cards, conversation boards, bingo for grammar and articulation practice, spatial concept activities, and much more.
Gareth Pitchford's Primary Resources (www.primaryresources.co.uk/index.htm) includes a series of story illustrations (www.primaryresources.co.uk/english/englishcart.htm) such as King Midas that can be used for sequencing activities.
(www.primaryresources.co.uk/english/cartoons/kingmidasC.pdf)
From preschool printables (www.preschoolprintables.com/)
- File folder games can be used for working on colors, shapes, numbers, letters, and matching exercises. Laminate the matching set and put a small amount of Aleene's Tack-It Over & Over glue on the back to temporarily attach the matching item several times
(www.preschoolprintables.com/filefolder/filefolder.shtml).
- Felt-board activities are available including The Three Little Pigs (www.preschoolprintables.com/felt/3pigs/feltpigc1.shtml)
Another nice set of materials for a felt-board activity, "Five Little Monkeys" (http://kizclub.com/storypatterns/monkeys(C).pdf) can be found at the KizClub site (http://kizclub.com).
Speech Teach UK Downloads contains many colorful pdf files
(www.speechteach.co.uk/p_general/downloads.htm).
- Use the picture cubes with accompanying game board to build sentences, answer who, what, where questions, or as story starters (www.speechteach.co.uk/download1.php?file=story_cubes_pdfs.zip).
- The Animal flash cards 1 and 2 are lovely
(www.speechteach.co.uk/download1.php?file=animalmatchup1big.zip;
www.speechteach.co.uk/download1.php?file=animalmatchup2big.zip).
- "Odd one out" part 1 and part 2 provides opportunity for problem solving and carryover
(www.speechteach.co.uk/download1.php?file=o_o_out_set1.zip;
/www.speechteach.co.uk/download1.php?file=o_o_out_set2.zip).
Additional FLASHCARDS are available on many sites. "Ideas with Flash Cards for Any Level" provides helpful suggestions (www.xtec.es/~jcabrer1/flashcards/flashcareng.html).
- From ABC teach (www.abcteach.com/), sets of flashcards (www.abcteach.com/directory/basics/flashcards/), including
A to Z Flashcards, Number Flashcards, Color Flashcards, People, Places, or Things, Emotions, and Senses
- "Royalty-free clip art collection for foreign/second language instruction" (www.sla.purdue.edu/fll/JapanProj/FLClipart) illustrates parts of speech for vocabulary and sentence building.
- Food flash cards can be used for vocabulary building or classification exercises (e.g., plants and animals, solids and liquids) (www.nutrition.org.uk/education/teachercentre/flashcards.htm).
- Two sites designed for those learning English as a second language contain a wealth of flashcards. EnglishRaven.com (www.englishraven.com/Main.html) is a subscription site with many sets of downloadable flashcards. There are several free samples and reduced rates for individuals only interested in the flashcards. Boggle's World (http://bogglesworld.com/) has a variety of freely available flashcards (http://bogglesworld.com/cards.htm).
Judith Kuster is in the department of speech, hearing, and rehabilitation services at Minnesota State University, Mankato. Contact her by email at judith.kuster@mnsu.edu. All of Kuster’s Internet columns are on the ASHA Web site in HTML format with active links http://professional.asha.org/news/news.cfm, although URLs change and there is no guarantee that links from previous articles are still functional.
Kuster, JM, Get Your Laminating Equipment Ready!, ASHA Leader, July 20, 2004, p. 37