Guest Blog by Jenna Rayburn

OMG!  (as in Oh My Goodness)  You HAVE to read this post by Jenna Rayburn and you MUST start following her blog!  This gal is one of my favorite go to people for great and creative therapy ideas!!   She has made  my list of (insert angelic ♫♪♫ sound here) "SLP Goddesses" like Cindy Meeser! 

Jenna is an SLP from Ohio working with preschool and elementary speech kids.  She has all the alphabet soup at the end of her name making her qualified to work magic ;) She is bubbly and fun and one of the sweetest gals you could ever meet.

When I read her blog on how to take Pinterest images and create your own picture boards for therapy activities, I knew I would have to share that with you because it is too good to miss!!  I thank God for creative people like Jenna.

Used with her permission here's her recent blog post.

Thursday, March 8, 2012

Turning Pinterest Boards Into A Therapy Activity!

If you follow me on pinterest, you might notice I use it A LOT. A few weeks ago PediaStaff started creating boards with pictures to be used in therapy. They made boards with action pictures, pronouns, problem solving, inferencing and concepts. As soon as Heidi emailed me and told me about them, I knew I could adapt them for speech therapy on the ipad. I figured it would be way more entertaining than printing them all out! About the same time, I won an app called TapikeoHD. After playing with it for a while I realized it was perfect for the PediaStaff pinterest boards. Let me show you what I came up with! 

The app I used is called Tapikeo and available at this time for $2.99 in the app store. Tapikeo allows you create your own audio-enabled picture books, storyboards, audio flashcards, and more using a versatile grid style layout. Check it out for yourself in the itunes store here. 

 First I opened Pinterest on my ipad and decided I would make an activity working on labeling verbs. I opened their board for actions words.

  Then I saved the pictures to my ipad by holding down on them to save. 

 Next you will head on over to the app and start a new grid. When you click on the empty grid square you will get a screen like this. If you want text to accompany your photo/audio (and I did because I want to support literacy skills!)  you can type that in at the top. I type " The boy is ___." Then select 'browse' to add the photos you just saved to the ipad. Then select record. For my grid I saved my voice reading "The boy is." When I use it with younger students, all they need to do is name the verb. For older students working on full sentence generation - I can turn the sound off and they are responsible for developing the whole sentence. 

Once I finished adding all my cards (it took me about 5 or 10 minutes) the board looks like this. 

When the student clicks on one of the pictures, it expands to fill the screen and the audio/visual joins the picture. This is when my students identified the verb or created a new sentence!  


There is also an 'e-book' setting where the app transfers your pictures into more of a slideshow like setting. I kept mine on the grid formation so I could work on receptive language skills at the same time. I had the students pick their picture a few different ways: by following directions with spatial concepts, by answering WH questions, or by listening to clues and making basic inferences. 


These boards are easy to make in the app and PediaStaff has done most of the work finding all these great images. What other topic boards would you like to see PediaStaff create?

Guest Blog-My New Favourite Therapy Tool

Congratulations to all you SLPs who made it through another year! I’m sure you are now getting ready for summer and a change of pace. I know many will work summer school, many will work in a clinic or private setting, and many will take this break to get rest and recharge for next school term. Whatever you do, I hope you make this the best summer ever.

Today’s blog entry is a change of pace for us, as we are featuring our first guest blog. When I read this featured blog last week, I thought this is totally a 2 Gals type blog and needs to be shared with our readers. This is a repost of Reka’s blog from her site (http://easyspeakideas.blogspot.com) Reka is a beautiful, shoe-lovin’ SLP from Barbados who has graciously allowed us to share this with you. I love this idea and know without a doubt you will love it too.

Hey everyone!

First of all I'd like to thank you all for your feedback on my last blog post "Green Analogies". I really appreciate it and am glad that you liked my random ramblings. I was able to draw reference to the analogy last night, as I gave a talk to a church congregation on children's speech and language development, and it was well received :)

Those who have been following my blog, would know that I love making resources, and I love when therapy tools can be used for a range of topics. Last week I bought my most useful therapy tool so far: my magnetic white board. It was on sale too!

Everyone loves it and I've been trying to find lots of different ways to use it in therapy. This was aided by my trusty laminator and some adhesive magnetic strip.

I wanted to share with my readers some of the cool uses of my new companion:

This one worked on categorizing sky, sea and land, as both a receptive and an expressive task.

This next one is my favourite, as I love the "Five little monkeys" rhyme. The children love that Mr. Crocodile can actually snatch the monkeys off the "tree".

The next one I adapted from a file folder game which works on big and little. Children have to choose the big or little object called, then put it on the appropriate side of the board.

Another one I made up on the spot was for prepositions 'on' vs 'under', which worked a lot better than I thought.

It also came in handy when I had to quickly draw some minimal pairs for /s/ and /n/ in final position, but those ones I definitely won't dare to share (they were ridiculed enough during the session).

These are my newest resources so far for my white board, but I have a few running around in my head which I will try to make over the next week, and share as an update to this post.

I want to hear from you readers. Do you use white boards in therapy? How do you use them?

Thanks for reading :)

Aren't those just the best ideas? Thanks Reka for sharing your creative ideas with us!

I hope you will bookmark Reka's blog site and become a regular follower.

We will see you next week!

Leah and Dean

www.2galsspeechproducts.com