Elinor Wonders Why (PBS Kids)

The PBS Kids activities corresponding with the series Elinor Wonders Why provide a number of language targets and are another example of modern web design (i.e. not flash-based). I also like activities with outdoor themes that you can couple with small "field trips" of your own if working in-person. These are now added to the PBS Kids task-analysis spreadsheet.

Curious Campout- good narrative play, like a mini "Toca Life." Click to interact with objects e.g. to set up the tents or put wood on the fire.

Hide and Seek- for one or two players (one covers eyes), hide 4 characters across a wooded area and take turns finding them. Good for spatial concepts and causals, as players are more hidden with clothes colors that camouflage them. 

Two more are added to the linked spreadsheet above!

Considering Games with the FIVES Criteria

When considering whether a game-based or "game-like" app is useful for an intervention context, I've found that a number of characteristics or features related to the FIVES criteria can be considered. I actually was looking for a game-based app related to the Winter Olympics but came up short...until Fiete emailed me this morning with an announcement about Fiete Wintersports (I had already been a fan of their Summer Olympics app and was looking to see if they had a winter one). This app provides a good example of some aspects of FIVES that make it very worthwhile:

F- Fairly Priced?
The app is free to download and provides you with two sports- skiing and bobsled. 14 in total can be unlocked with one in-app purchase of $2.99. To me, fair, given the below.

I-Interactive?
With games, you want interactivity to be within limits. Fiete Sports has a timed aspect but you can't time out, and no matter what, you get a medal. There is no way to stall or go off-course with any of the sports. Each sport shows you how to interact with the screen VERY SIMPLY (e.g. tap quickly, tap and drag) as the sport launches. The activities are very short, promoting the possibility of children in a group having many turns, or you can divide the play of one event among several students.

V-Visual?
Each sport gives you a visual sense of how it works- much of which would be new to young learners and build semantic knowledge. The visuals would promote verbal expression as students could be asked to describe how the event works, perhaps using a frame like Ward/Jacobsen's STOP- Space, Time, Objects, People. I found that using the app while mirroring to an Apple TV in my clinical setting kept all engaged with the visual, and commenting on the event.

E-Educationally Relevant?
An app about the Olympics relates to current events, social studies and geography. Though the app provides limited verbal information about the events or Olympics in general, it provides a post-activity to reviewing picture books or other texts about the Olympics, focusing on vocabulary, figurative language (see my book collection at EPIC Books for Kids, the "Winter Olympic Sports" series has some nice slang), or look up the Olympics on Newsela.

S-Speechie?
The app itself targets no clinical objectives- but the language you can elicit around it within your activities would elicit cause-effect statements of why the event went as it did, categorizations of sports (winter vs summer, individual vs. team, ones played on flat surfaces vs. hills), and any activities done around text as mentioned above. Pair with a YouTube video about sportsmanship and you can do some narrative language, observational and social cognitive work. As mentioned in my previous post, explore how to re-create events in "real life" play and target the group planning aspects of this!

More on mapping expository texts through tech, Part 3

In the past several posts I have been discussing resources for visually mapping expository (and by extension, narrative) topics. In the last post I outlined the use of Kidspiration's Super Grouper feature for sorting ideas into categories--it can also be used for sequencing. Kidspiration and its older brother Inspiration (again free to try, $9.99 for full app, also available for Mac or PC and even on the web) are better known for their mind-mapping or diagramming features. Like Popplet (described in this post), these apps can be used to create graphic organizers showing the connection between different ideas. Unlike Popplet, however, the text within the idea bubbles can be exported to other apps so students can see planning activities as being helpful toward actually getting their writing done.

In Kidspiration, create diagram activities by selecting Diagram from the home screen. It's fairly self explanatory to map connections between pictures and symbols using this feature. The diagram can be used to create a discussion web as displayed below. Discussion webs in language intervention are discussed in Hoggan & Strong's excellent article The Magic of Once Upon a Time: Narrative Teaching Strategies (and also this "how to"), which has served as an inspiration for my "Pairing Picture Books with Apps" presentations. A number of other narrative teaching visuals demonstrated in the article can also be created with Kidspiration and Inspiration.

Inspiration in all its versions is particularly appropriate for upper elementary through adult learners, and is often recommended as an Assistive Technology (AT) tool. Inspiration shares many of the features of Kidspiration including the picture library, ability to add photos, and helpful templates; Inspiration does not have the Super Grouper feature described in the last post.

Both Kidspiration and Inspiration allow you to create a graphic organizer with students and export the contents in outline form to a word processor, thus bringing the initial planning work to a place that it can be continued (e.g. a word processor such as Pages, Word, or Google Docs). The blank-slate nature of these apps as well as the availability of connecting bubbles and arrows make it ideal for instruction in the methodology of using expository text structures to plan writing and show the flow of ideas in a topic--making these both comprehension and expression tools. See Teresa Ukrainetz' Strategic Intervention for Expository Texts: Teaching Text Preview and Lookback (another good reason to have an ASHA SIG membership so you can access Perspectives journals) for another helpful discussion of expository text structure and other strategies.

Be sure when using Inspiration and Kidspiration to avoid creating webs unless your topic is a descriptive one. Create an organized structure by adding new detail bubbles to your topic heading shape (see above with List, tapping on the arrow button will create new connected bubbles you can drag into position). Naturally, you will want your detail bubbles to contain content related to the topic as opposed to just key words for organization. As below, switching to Outline view will then make your work result in a useful outline rather than too much hierarchy. See below, tapping the Share button will allow you to export.

More on mapping expository texts using tech, Part 2

In a recent ASHA Leader article I discussed intervention activities centered around social studies and expository text, and am continuing to discuss expository language in part one of this series and in this post.

One of the most useful apps for categorization and other expository language activities is Kidspiration Maps (free to try, $9.99 for full app). I truly believe this app should be in every SLP's and reading specialist's library as it has so many contextual uses. Pair this app with a picture book, textbook passage, video, discussion, information from another app or website...the list goes on. Kidspiration has been around for many years as a software resource and is still available also for Mac or PC, but at a higher pricepoint than the iPad version that shares almost all of its features.

I will talk about the diagramming features of Kidspiration (and its older brother Inspiration) and expository language in the next post, but in this post I would like to highlight Kidspiration's terrific Super Grouper feature. Super Groupers allow you to create an activity where you sort words and pictures into categories. Again, I find that these activities can be created to accompany any book or topic, and students enjoy taking your "wordsplash" or "picturesplash" and putting it in order. In the process, you can ask them to verbalize categories and descriptive attributes that serve as rationales for their sorting.

To offer a contextual example, students of mine were reading Iron Thunder by Avi- this is the story of the fateful battle of the ironclad ships Merrimack and Monitor during the Civil War. As we reviewed the first chapters it was clear my students were not so solid on the concepts and associations around the North and South at this time. I constructed a simple Super Grouper activity to address this:

The Super Groupers are the large blue and gray (color coded purposefully) rectangles in this case, with ovals containing information about perspectives, characters, synonyms, geographic information, actions, and so on, to sort. The student interacts with the activity by tapping and dragging the items (which can be pictures also, see below) into the Super Groupers. Once completed, you can also switch to Outline view (tap on outline icon in upper left) to see the information in a linear fashion:

One great feature of the Inspiration Software apps is that diagrams and outlines can be exported- from Outline View tap the share button and you can export as text to other apps such as Pages or even Google Docs, where students can expand on the language.

To create a Super Grouper activity, select the Super Grouper option from the home screen. The Super Grouper menu (highlighted at top) lets you tap and drag shapes into the work area. Double tap at the top of your shape to label it. Tap to select your shape, then tap the paintbrush at the bottom menu to change the background color.

The picture library is accessed from the "frame" icon. Browse the categories to tap/drag items to be sorted; you can also search the library or add photos, making even the visual contexts of Kidspiration limitless. You can add audio support to your activity or have students record sentences as they sort by tapping any picture, then the microphone button at the bottom, which allows you to record an audio note.

To make a more text-based sorting activity, use the Shapes menu. Double tap on any shape to type in it.

A very helpful feature of Kidspiration is that activities can be duplicated, so that in the event you complete the sort with multiple groups, you don't have to keep unsorting the items! From the Open Document menu, tap Edit, then tap to select an activity, and tap the Copy icon. This menu also allows you to share your created activities with colleagues who have Kidspiration. From the Open Document menu, tap Edit, then tap to select an activity, and tap the Share icon. From there you can mail the activity, send it to Dropbox, or tap More to send to Google Drive (where you can share the file with whomever). It's a great idea for a group of colleagues to work together creating and sharing activities that would be useful to all.

More on mapping expository texts using tech, Part 1

In a column I contributed to August's ASHA Leader, I mentioned expository text structures as providing an important framework for organizing language for comprehension and expression, in this case around social studies topics.

First, to elaborate on expository text structure, this is the informational "sibling," so to speak of teaching story grammar--parts of a story and the connections of character, setting, initiating event, response, plan, events, and conclusion. Expository text structures can be located both in narratives and informational text (e.g. a news article, textbook, lecture or video) and include list, sequence, description, compare/contrast, and so on. An excellent recent tutorial article (Lundine & McCauley, 2016) provides more information and research tie-ins for these strategies; commercial products targeting the use of these structures include Mindwing Concepts' ThemeMaker®* and Thinking Maps.

Another good resource providing a venue for teaching these skills and strategies is Popplet Lite (Free, the full version of Popplet allows you to have multiple drafts), with built-in graphic organizers in a visual creation tool where students can combine photos, text, and drawings to explain an idea or topic.

With Popplet Lite, you can:
-tap to create "popples" to contain your ideas for the topic
-color code main ideas
-connect ideas in lines demonstrating text structures (e.g. list, sequence, cause-effect)
-add images (copy/paste from Safari is easiest) or drawings
-export your creation in several formats.

In several followup posts, I'll be discussing other resources for mapping narrative and expository text.

*Disclosure: Author provides blog content for Mindwing Concepts, Inc. 

MarcoPolo Arctic

I have been meaning to write about this app for some time, but it is free today (5/6/16) and fairly priced at $2.99 anyway, so pick it up! Thank you to Smart Apps for Kids for always being a great resource. Do you follow their Friday posts detailing app sales and freebies? There is a "Free App Alert" you can subscribe to on the site. The website is also a wealth of information on interactive apps, with many features on apps from an educational and therapeutic point of view-- very FIVES Criteria-friendly!

MarcoPolo's apps, such as their previous wonderful Weather entry, are "sandbox" apps encouraging interactive exploration and play within a context, specifically geared toward STEM education. However, being quite language-neutral, the visuals provide a great avenue for talk, description of items and actions, and causal and conditional language. Overall the apps can be used for developing descriptive schema (perhaps with the use of the Expanding Expression Tool) or expository text structures as well (e.g. list, sequence, cause-effect, compare-contrast) as post-activities.

Arctic (please click through to download from Smart Apps for Kids and support them) provides an interactive land-sea environment allowing you to insert and name species in different categories and interact with them (e.g. feeding). Students can also observe their behaviors as they are placed in the arctic habitat. The app also features puzzles that provide brief auditory narrations (ask wh-questions or prompt students to summarize) focusing on categories such as land animals or birds, describe body parts and functions. The app can also be paired with many books as a post-book activity (e.g. Winston of Churchill or The Emperor's Egg).

Social Fortune and Fate/Comics Head

As a member of the Social Thinking® Blogging Team, I am happy to be given the occasional opportunity to review one of their excellent products (I have them all anyway)! In this post, I will be taking a look at Social Fortune or Social Fate: A Social Thinking Graphic Novel for Social Quest Seekers (SFOF) by Dr. Pamela Crooke and Michelle Garcia Winner. This book is positioned as geared toward Middle School students and a great starting point for teaching Social Thinking concepts to older kids, and it is indeed both.

SFOF is formatted as a graphic novel with a twist- one half of the book depicts episodes where characters make "unexpected" social choices and must deal with how they have changed others emotions in negative ways, leading to icky consequences. Flip the book over and the episodes, with identical situations, are presented as the characters utilize expected behaviors, with more positive emotions and consequences resulting. The episodes include ten situations very relevant to middle and high school settings (upper elementary, too), including participating in class discussions, group work, finishing homework, asking for help, figuring out what to say when hanging out, and dealing with boring moments.

Image from Social Thinking website, product description page.

Each situation is depicted, discussed, and analyzed with a number of visual and conceptual tools that you can target with students in many other "teachable moments" beyond the contexts of the book. These include a spin on Social Thinking's Social Behavior Mapping technique, in which behaviors are linked to others' thoughts/feelings, consequences and feelings about the self, here called the Road of Social Fortune or Fate. Once explored, this concept can be used in all sorts of situations across the home and school day (see also the book on Social Behavior Mapping or its in-depth teaching via Think Social). The book also includes "Emotion Meters" and a "Problem Thermometer" to emphasize  understanding of behavioral impacts on others' emotions and the "Size of Problem" strategy.

One of my favorite aspects of the book, besides the Manga graphics which kids tend to find engaging, is the use of "Strategy Codes" related to the episodes to emphasize ways of thinking about the social world. Geared to access kids' interest in games ("cheat codes" can be used to navigate through levels of various video games), these handy acronyms are ripe for visual display and reference in your therapy room. These include MOBS (Moments of Boredom Survival), FOTO (Filter Thoughts and Opinions Often), TAC (Think About Choices), and FBI-ESP (Feel it Big Inside, Express it Smaller in Public). Once established in your students' memory, these can provide quick ways of providing feedback on both expected and unexpected behaviors.

Like many aspects of Social Thinking, kids will need some time and extra activities to process and apply the information in this book, and I have mentioned before that I would be reviewing some Social Thinking products with a tech spin. I often pair lessons from SFOF with comic creation, a natural connection to the contexts of the book. Real-life photo comics can be great to create with students, but can take a bit of work with the staging and acting involved (see Story Me for a great way to get your feet wet with this type of app). I like at first to use comic creation apps that contain some content, i.e. characters and backgrounds. For awhile, this was an area lacking in iPad-dom (but see the wonderful Pixton if you have a laptop available), but this changed with the release of Comics Head (free, with full version allowing for unlimited editable comics available at 3.99).

Comics Head is a one-stop comic creator allowing you to select from a variety of character styles, emotions, and settings, including importing background images from the Camera Roll. Though the menu takes a few minutes to get used to, you (and students) can create comics with ease once familiar with the features. Comics Head also works well when paired with the Story Grammar Marker® methodology to help students plan their stories- what will the characters, setting, and initiating events be? The app, like Pixton, allows you to save your comic as a template; you can therefore remix the comic showing the characters making different social choices and experiencing corresponding likely consequences.

I have used Comics Head in this way to make comics in which students apply the various Strategy Codes from SFOF- this one was a TAC (Think about Choices), and although not exactly a nuanced interpretation of that strategy, was great work for this student!

Comics Head also lets you insert (and trim!) saved pictures, thus allowing for limitless contexts. Beyond Strategy Codes, you can consider creating comics for situations not addressed in the book or, for younger students, comics relevant to the Superflex! curriculum.

As always, YouTube is a great source of video tutorials on any app, including Comics Head.

I hope you will check out Social Fortune or Social Fate (and Comics Head). Even if you are just getting started, both of these resources will open a lot of doors for you!

Disclosure: Author was provided a free copy of this book (but already had it!) by Social Thinking, based on the work of Michelle Garcia Winner, and is a contractor for provision of blog content and workshop presentations for Mindwing Concepts, creator of the Story Grammar Marker.

Write About This

Write About This is an app designed by educators that uses the technique of providing photo prompts as a way to foster writing skills. Visuals such as those in this app give students a place to start with their language, and the prompts that come with the app provide a context to develop writing with the use of strategies such as story grammar mapping or use of expository text structure (list, sequence, description, etc).

What I like particularly about the app is that the authors didn't stop at simply substituting printed photo prompts with an app version, but incorporated a few key features of the iPad to make this a more powerful resource. While students can type onscreen (and text or text/images can be sent via email to continue developing the work in class), they also can "Publish with Audio" and save their visual work with an audio narration as a movie on the Camera Roll. Additionally, pictures taken with the iPad or saved to the Camera Roll can be used in the app to create customized photo prompts. This would give clinicians or teachers the opportunity to work with a group of students to select a great photo and create a prompt for another group of students to use. Presenting the recorded audio between groups will also allow you to work on auditory comprehension.

Write About This is available in a full-featured free version with a limited number of prompts (about 50 as opposed to 375). I was excited to see that the authors are developing another app called Tell About This, which takes the writing component out and focuses on oral language prompts for younger students.

CloudSpotter

Is it just me, or have the clouds been more noticeably pretty and dramatic this summer? Warmth probably brings more remarkable clouds, or at least one tends to pause and look at the sky more when it's not 2º out. In any case, it has been a wonderful summer in the Northeast and I have found myself doing quite a bit of cloud gazing.

To the point, clouds are a pretty great language context- they can be described, compared, associated with other shapes, and they are very educationally relevant to science units on weather and the water cycle. At EdCampBLC in mid-July, a participant shared the CloudSpotter app during the closing app-sharing session (these are called "Smackdowns"), and I was instantly intrigued. CloudSpotter ($1.99, found under iPhone apps but usable on iPad) is like a field guide to clouds; you can explore a cloud library of main cloud types as well as more exotic clouds and phenomena, in which each is clearly and even humorously explained, the text serving as a good context for mapping expository text. This section also has a short, engaging animated film on the water cycle. CloudSpotter is also interactive in a very fun way: snap a photo of a cloud, attempt to identify it, and submit it, and you will be able to contribute to your own cloud collection. The creators of the app review your submission and indicate if you have identified the cloud correctly (I identified several clouds and received a response within 24 hours)!

Language Lens:
-I have found taking pictures of clouds to be a fun task with kids, stretching back to the days when I would then connect the digital camera, insert the picture in a PowerPoint slide, and have them write about the weather for the day (good schema-building). With iPad, not surprisingly, it is so much easier! Screenshot your cloud pics from CloudSpotting and add them to any app that allows you to combine pictures and text, Popplet Lite, for example.
-This app could be used in conjunction with other resources that allow you to build descriptive language through the context of weather: viewing weather forecasts on TV station websites, EdHeads' Weather Activities, Swackett.
-Combine this app with the use of Tellagami and create weather forecasts!
-This app would pair well with a few picture books to build language: It Looked Like Spilt Milk and Cloudette (which has a great narrative structure for story mapping).

Hope you have all had a great summer and your transition back to school treats you well!

Wikiweb Shows Connections Between Topics

While Wikipedia is far from the gold standard of research sources, it does give a good general overview of topics and in my experience is quite well-written. It therefore is a helpful resource for developing reading comprehension, background knowledge and use of strategies for vocabulary and breaking down expository text.

I discovered Wikiweb, which displays articles as semantic web connections between ideas, because it was free at Starbucks, but at $2.99 I think it's still fairly priced. It's got a beautiful look and feel and the added feature of displaying visual connections between topics is potentially very useful for therapy. The articles as displayed can be selected in order to activate Speak Selection, so they can be read aloud as well.

This video from Wikiweb is a bit strange, and makes it seem like you should use the app just so you don't become Claire Danes in Homeland, but it gives you more of an idea how the app works.

Open Better Speech and Hearing Month with Sound Uncovered

Sound Uncovered is a gorgeous free app for iPad that you can use as a context to introduce Better Speech and Hearing Month to your students. The app explores the science of sound through a variety of interactives that you can use to bridge discussions about hearing conservation. In addition, the app itself provides a lot of content that you can use for mapping expository text, as it presents much information about how sound works. This is also a key curriculum area in "energy, light and sound" type units of science.

A sampling of the activities:
Which Car Would You Buy- Presents sounds produced by cars and car parts and links these to purchasing decisions.
What's Making This Sound? and Sounds Like?- Have you listen to sounds or people's descriptions of a sound in order to guess what they are talking about (inferences!).
Eyes vs. Ears- talk about "listening with your eyes" while exploring how visual input helps us understand sounds .
Stop Me If You've Heard This One- demonstrates that you can't talk and listen at the same time! I have a lot of students that can benefit from that one...

That's where I heard it, and the age is right!

Ultimately, Sound Uncovered is probably best for older (upper elementary, MS/HS) and high-functioning students, but the interactives could be adapted for young students. Exploratorium, the interactive museum of science, art and perception in San Francisco, offers a similar open-ended app called Color Uncovered, which also looks to be a good context for eliciting language and description.

Common Core Connection:
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.SL.6.1d Review the key ideas expressed and demonstrate understanding of multiple perspectives through reflection and paraphrasing.

Google on Apple: Google Catalogs

Continuing this series on Google's offerings on iOS, here's an app I know many SLPs will LOVE.  Catalogs can provide a great therapy material, as they are visual, descriptive, personally relevant and motivating, and filled with categories!  Catalogs also provide contexts that stretch across many age levels and populations.  There have been a number of good posts about using catalogs in therapy; see Speech Time Fun for one and Speech Room News for another.

Google is naturally involved in the world of goods and services, but I find it interesting that they chose to create an app as interactive and creative as Google Catalogs (free). Google Catalogs lets you browse catalogs in a wide variety of categories, pinch to zoom and tap the tag to select items to view more information.

The truly cool thing about this app is that it goes beyond information consumption to become a creative tool. You can tap the heart icon to "Favorite" any item, and then go into a collage mode to create a picture array integrating your favorites with a themed background and text.  This creative capability allows SLPs to target categories, descriptive language, causals, conditionals and written expression, or have clients work within a budget to target functional math.

Ok, maybe I don't really NEED these things...

As you can see from the screenshot, the collage mode allows you to add items you have tagged as favorites (heart), text, change themes, and share the collage. Check out the app, and make sure you don't buy too much in the process.

Common Core Connection:

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.4.1b Provide reasons that are supported by facts and details.

October is Appy-Picking Month! (and LeafSnap)

Before I go any further, I must acknowledge that I stole the phrase "Appy-Picking" from the terrific EdCeptional podcast...imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.  Have you listened to EdCeptional lately?

I must confess that I am not a big fan of the fall. Many of us seasonal affective disorder (SAD) sufferers view haybales, pumpkins and mums as harbingers of death.  However, I don't want to snow on anyone's fall festival, and figured I should get with the autumnal spirit.

Therefore, I am declaring October "Appy-Picking Month" here on SpeechTechie, and will be featuring 31 (I hope) bite-size posts about apps you can use in your therapy or clinical work, with maybe a more rambly analytical post here and there (consider those the roads between apple fields)!

To start, let's look at Leafsnap, an innovative app developed by a number of educational giants such as Columbia University and the Smithsonian. Leafsnap is an "electronic field guide" to trees that is easily tied to curriculum around plants and seasons. I actually always use this one as an example of a curriculum-related interactive app, which I think are still few and far between. This free app uses technology similar to face recognition techniques to recognize and catalog plant species.  You can actually use this app to scan a leaf you pick up on a "walk" with your students, and the app will attempt to identify it! Leafsnap contains a lot of data about the Northeast U.S., and the plan is to expand that; I'd recommend you try out the app first before using it with students if you are not in the Northeast.

Image via FastCompany

Language Lens:

-Leafsnap can facilitate discussion of sequential differences between seasons, description, comparing/contrasting of leaves, and parts of trees (high-res pictures can be viewed for each species including individual parts- leaves, fruit, bark, etc), and the mapping interface can elicit all kinds of spatial language and relevant connections to students' own neighborhoods.

Common Core Connection:

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.SL.3.3 Ask and answer questions about information from a speaker, offering appropriate elaboration and detail.

Painting with Time- Climate Change

I previously wrote about the Painting with Time app as a great way to target temporal concepts, causal relationships and sentence structures, and descriptive language. The folks at Red Hill Studios have recently released another FREE app (iPad only), providing a context for language intervention as we approach Earth Day.  Painting with Time- Climate Change "lets your fingers reveal the dramatic ways our world is changing from rising temperatures." Through the innovative (yet surprisingly simple) interface, you can explore 17 different picture sequences that reveal effects of glacier movement (and disappearance) and extreme weather.  Thanks to Jeremy Legaspi for pointing out this important app sequel to me.

The Mississippi River in 2010 (top) and 2011, with effects of flooding

Painting with Time- Climate Change would be appropriate to use with upper elementary, middle- and high school students who can understand the concepts involved.  It has a number of applications for language therapy:

Language Lens:
-Picture scenes can be used to target gaps in students' geographic understanding and the categories of continents, oceans, and geographic features.
-Each sequence is accompanied by an informational paragraph that describes the scene and its sequential and cause-effect relationships involved; these would be good to map with a graphic organizer.
-The varying ranges of time involved in each sequence are contexts to develop time-lining skills and general temporal understanding, with perhaps relation to other world events.

You can find some other tech-based activities to target language skills in relation to the values of Earth Day here and here.

April Fool!

I am not a huge fan of April Fool's tricks, but I do enjoy Google's famous annual pranks. They used to have just one or two, but they have begun to announce a range of silly innovations each April 1, one for each of their products.

This video is a compilation of four of the video "announcements" from this year:



Exploring Google's April Fool's pranks can make for a good language lesson!

Language Lens:
-The video provides a good context to explore descriptive schema and describe each of the four products: Chrome, Maps, Gmail, and YouTube.  Kids will know a lot about them, and you can scaffold their description of the tools' function, associations, and sequence of how they are used.  Teaching expository text structures in this way can generalize so that students can use them in other contexts.
-This video lends itself to discussion of social use of humor and using a 5-Point Scale of "What's Funny?" There's a great one in The Social Times, but you can easily make one with your kids, the variables being WHO thinks a joke is funny (progressively fewer people, with a 5 being "no one"), and progressively increasing offensive content/stereotyping/swearing/potential to harm others, and potential consequences. We noticed that the Google Maps prank veered toward the stereotyping side, with only people of Asian descent being depicted as interested in the "new item."
-Scaffold the students' understanding of the commonality in the pranks- all present tech innovations that are actually a step backward, or more than a step.

Draw that Habitat!

I love resources that provide enough material to allow for repetition of activities- our kids benefit not only from trying things more than once but also from generalizing to other contexts.  When a topic is real-life and relatable to curriculum, even better! Take the topic of animal habitats- how "Speechie" is it? Well, habitats can be described in detail, visualized, have different categories of animals living in them, experience cycles/sequences based on weather and climate, and of course the relationship between animals and habitats is linked to cause and effect and conditional language (if something changed in the habitat, then...)

Take a look at PBS Kids' Go's Draw that Habitat! This resource is linked to the PBS Kids Fetch series, which incidentally has an amazing free app that uses augmented reality to target counting and addition skills. Draw that Habitat! challenges kids to create a habitat for an imaginary animal for whom a few targeted characteristics are provided:

Draw that Habitat! has its own art pad (which is Flash-based, so non-iPad friendly) for kids to draw the picture and submit after you create an account.  Submitting provides the extra rationale of "publishing" one's work, often powerfully motivating, but you will probably have to set realistic expectations about work being recognized by the site (I have no idea how many submissions they get).

The other aspect of Draw that Habitat that makes this a great Project-Based or Theme-Based Learning kind of site is that previous months' animals and habitats are featured on the Gallery page.  This provides a great resource to set the context and provide examples for students.  You can use the examples for picture description activities, read the rationales for why the examples were chosen for the animal, and even have the kids evaluate and "rate" the submitted drawings.  So many language opportunities! You could also use previous animal descriptions (the "About this Animal") for additional practice in constructing habitats.  

Although you cannot use the site's art pad and submit for previous months' animals, this is a good place to use traditional drawing materials or an app such as Doodle Buddy.

Painting With Time

Painting with Time is a terrific FREE iPad (only) app that allows you to interact with a pre-loaded series of images in order to show the effects of time.  For example, Spring Comes to Boston, one of the available "time sequences" can be "painted" with the finger to reveal the changes that take place over the Spring months, at 3, 5, and 7 weeks.  You can also "slice" pictures in various ways to reveal changes at different points in time.

The center of this picture of Boston Common and Public Garden is "painted" with the 7 weeks paint, while the perimeter shows the scene at the beginning of Spring.  As a picture description activity, Painting with Time also gives you the opportunity to develop vocabulary and conceptual language.

The sequences in the gallery vary over different levels of time, from seasons to months, weeks, minutes and even a "beginning/middle/end" sequence with a mural and ice sculpture. I especially like the Messy Room sequence, showing the stages of cleaning up a teen's room at Start/15 minutes/30 minutes.  Kids with language and executive functioning difficulties have trouble with time concepts, and Painting with Time is a nice, no risk tool for you to use to target these skills. Additionally, causals and past/future tenses can be elicited when you discuss the scenes with students and make predictions about what it will look like after they paint. Painting with Time is essentially a picture description activity with a really fun twist!

Sensory Garden

Sensory Garden is one of those great resources you can return to for many thematic lessons, with countless opportunities to model and elicit a skill.  This interactive website presents you with a garden scene that changes across all 4 seasons, with each season providing different activities.  In the "Activities," um, activity, students are tasked to find all the actions one can do in the garden.  When they do so, they are shown an animation of the action:

The garden also has My Garden and Explore modes where students can build the garden with items from different categories and view the sensory (5 senses-related) experiences in the garden, respectively. 

Language Lens:

• The Activities mode is a great context to model verbs, temporals and causal constructions: "The lawn needs mowing BECAUSE the grass is long!"
• By building their own garden, students will practice using categories and descriptive skills, and perhaps explaining why they made certain choices.
• The site is an engaging way to reinforce abstract curriculum around months, seasons, and the 5 Senses.

This site IS NOT iPad-friendly as it is flash-based.

Thank you to Teaching Students with Learning Difficulties for highlighting this resource.

CDC Analyze My Plate and Recipe Remix

CDC Analyze My Plate and Recipe Remix are interactive activities from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control aimed at curbing childhood obesity and promoting a healthier diet.  Analyze My Plate allows you to build a meal (breakfast, lunch or dinner) and view categories such as total calories and fat.  In Recipe Remix, you can take an unhealthy recipe and change quantity and type of ingredients so that it becomes more healthy.

Language Lens:

• Analyze My Plate is a great way to review food categories, and bombard/elicit causals, conditionals and temporals- What happens when we add an apple?  You can also compare and contrast different plates!
• Recipe Remix would be a great followup in situations when you can cook with kids.  Choose a recipe and follow the site's advice, then use the cooking activity as a context for oral and written language.

Pumpkin Circle

Pumpkin Circle is a great book for this time of year.  Kindergarteners at my school always study apples and pumpkins, learn their parts and life cycles, and do a compare-contrast project- all totally language-y stuff!  Pumpkin Circle was turned into a rather strange companion film (but kids watch, riveted) you can view on the Described and Captioned Media Program site, if you are a member.  If you don't have access to the book or movie, check out this cute video of it being read as a bedtime story:



Apples and pumpkins are great to compare-contrast using Kidspiration, Inspiration (both available as 30-day trials), or the web-based version, Webspiration (still totally free and the same as the software programs).  It's hard to share one of these files by blog, but you could recreate something like my activity here:

Using Kidspiration, Inspiration, or Webspiration, kids can click-drag ideas into groups and meaningful connections.