Valentine's Day

Typically I feel like I am a day late when it comes to doing holiday themed activities.  Usually I find SO many fabulous ideas/products to use, and then run out of time! So this time, I am NOT going to let that happen! We are turning the speech room over into Valentine's Day this coming week! Also, I am excited to get rid of all of my snowman decor because (like every other person in the Midwest) I am sick of snow! Here are a few things to help get you in the Valentine's Day spirit! There's a black and white freebie, a black and white articulation packet, a fun craft activity to target a variety of language skills, and the non food Valentine's treat I'm giving to my students!

Let's start with the craft....does anyone else here have a Target dollar bin addiction? However, if you go looking, some of these supplies were actually located on an end cap towards the party section (my second favorite section in target). 

My 2.5 year old niece and I had a lot of fun making her mom a birthday card during one of our "cold days", but here's what I plan on doing with the rest of the Valentine's Day craft supplies. We are going to be making Valentine's to hang in the speech room (Adios, snowmen!) and then right before Valentine's Day the students will be able to take them home to give to someone they love. 

To "speechify" this craft here's what we are going to do. 

 1. Students will need to work to get their supplies (ex: if they are working on articulation they will need to say their sound 5 times before getting each heart/pom pom/ etc., if they are working on past tense they will need to complete 1 target (take a regular tense verb and make it past tense in a sentence)).

  2. When finished students will need to tell me 5 (number will vary with skill level) things about the Valentine they made and I will record it for them (I don't like to waste a lot of time having students write because its often very laborious for them and they come to speech to TALK!) This will target adjectives and descriptions. (colors, size, shape, sparkly, soft, etc.) 

3. For students who have adjectives/MLU/description goals I will use the written descriptions I record to describe the hearts and have students identify the one I am describing. 

4. On the day they go to take them home, I will have students describe their Valentine to me so that I can take it down and give it to them. If they are having trouble I will have their answers from the day them made them recorded. It also might be cute if I come up with some sort of fun format to write down the descriptions to send home for parents to see how hard students are working during speech. 

Next, lets get to the FREEBIE! Its black and white (no color in, and no prep needed) 

Do you love activities that keep hands busy while students are talking? Do you love products that don't require any prep on your part? Do  you love activities that don't use any colored ink? Then check out the this Valentine's Day themed articulation packet! It includes 25 different target sheets! It's on sale for 50% off TODAY (1/20/2014) only! 

Lastly, I wanted to share the link to  PINTEREST where I found my Valentine's Day treat I am going to give my students! They are very inexpensive and not food (yay, no need to worry about food allergies!) I would post a picture, but even though I'm getting my Valentine's Day blog post done early, I have not even thought about making these puppies yet! (But I did buy all the materials so it will happen)