Back to School Blog Hop!

Welcome to the Back to School SLP Blog Hop!

You will get the chance to collect great back to school ideas for SLPs, win prizes and get freebies by touring 17 fantastic blogs!

Use the Linkytools at the bottom of this post to hop around the 17 participating blogs, collect ideas and the clues!

Can you believe it's that time again?  Summer is coming (or has come for some of you) to a close and the new school year is looming ahead.  So what better time to have a blog hop?

The activity I am going to share with you today is a whole class activity and its great for SLPs that will be pushing into classrooms and providing whole class lessons.  I love it because I think its a great way to find out how our students think about themselves, what they like about themselves and how they can find something good in others.

This is an example of the activity. As you can see I filled out the "Awesome" sheet and my 3 year old told me what he thought was cool about me. Awww...so sweet!  Kind words feel good!!! 

So what do you need for this activity?

• paper bags (lunch sacks)-1 for each student
• writing instruments-could be crayons, markers, pencils, pens, etc. 
• "I'm awesome because" paper, (one for each student stapled/glued/taped to the closed lunch sack)
• "I think it's cool" strips, copied and cut...at least slip one per child times the number of children in your class
• If your students are going to be cutting out the "I think it's cool strips" you'll need scissors too

What do you do?

This is a positive affirmation activity.  Students will leave their classroom with a bag full of complements from their peers and teachers.

Grab your "I'm Awesome Because..." Freebie here!

Every child gets a closed lunch sack with the "I'm awesome because" paper taped/glued or stapled to the bag.  Each child will fill out their forms with the information about themselves.  You can decide if you want the students to share their answers with a buddy (this would be a great task for social skills and when working on voice).  They can place the completed paper bags (open) on a back table in the classroom.  Either during this specific lesson time, or at various times during the rest of the school day (depending on how you want to do this), students can go to the back of the room, read their peers bags and fill out an "I think it's cool" strip for EACH of their peers.

Grab your "I think It's Cool" Freebie here!

By the end of the day, each child should have a paper bag full of really cool complements!  Keep in mind for some of these students (particularly the students with difficult behaviors or social skills issues) this may be  the only time they receive compliments from their peers so this can really be a nice activity for these students in particular.

What can be targeted?

This activity is so great because you can work on so many different goals:

a.  articulation, fluency, decoding can all be targeted in reading

b.  phonological awareness, spelling, encoding, literacy can be targeting in writing

c.  social skills (teaching our children with ASD to give compliments about something their peer wrote on their bag may be very tough for some of our kids so you may need to be there to help them form a nice compliment to their peers)

Check out all the cool prizes you could win on the Rafflecopter widget below!!!!!

The rules of the contest are simple:
* You must decode a secret message
* In order to complete this task, you will need to visit each of the 16 blogs and find the OWL CLUE
* The OWL CLUE will include one word that is part of the code. 
* You can enter the contest through Rafflecopter below or you can enter by heading back to Figuratively Speeching SLP's blog.  REMEMBER you will be asked to type in the secret code so write down all the words and unscramble the clue. 
The contest will run from: August 11th-17th

Enjoy reading through the blogs, downloading the freebies, and participating in our Blog Hop! Good luck everyone!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

My secret word is:

Happy Talking and Blog Hopping!!!