Speech 2U

Once you reach them, you can teach them.

Halloween masks

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I used to have a whole box of masks and novelty headbands.  “Ex. I’m a rabbit, I’m the devil etc.”  _  that I would use in speech therapy.  I left it at an on old job and found that I missed it.

1.  Eye Contact/Facial Referencing:  There’s nothing like putting on a pair of rabbit ears or a hamburger hat to increase facial referencing.  I’d try to do it when kids weren’t expecting it, so they knew they needed to look at me to make sure I wasn’t wearing something silly.
2.  Greetings:  For this activity, I’d hide outside the therapy room and knock on the door.  I’d wait for them to ask me to come in and then we would work on greetings plus name (Hi, hamburger head.)
3.   Perspective Taking/Conversation Skills:  For this activity we both choose a mask or headband.  Then we think about what the other person might like to talk about.  I saw some presidential masks earlier this year at Target, but I don’t know that I would go there yet.

I recently found a really fun FREE app called Mask Mania.  Take a picture with your Ipad and then
you put a variety of masks on your face.  They have a lot of masks to try: Batman, clowns, princesses, Dwight from the Office among others.

I ended up upgrading to the paid version as I wanted to be able to print out some of the pictures of my husband and son.  The free version would be fine for therapy-you just can’t save or print the pictures.

Here is how I’ve used in therapy:
1.  Requesting information/actions: “What am I?,”   “Can I see it?”
2.  Sentence Structure:  I am a clown.
3.  20 questions:  Am I a Superhero, Am I a girl etc.
4.  Stating opinions:  I like it, I don’t like it.
5.  Stating reasons:  I don’t like it because I’m scared of clowns.

Guess What I am is a fun game similar to Headbandz.  It has a lot of community helpers which is nice if you are doing a unit on occupations.  It’s a little hard because you need to keep holding the page up to your head.  I play it with the kids to target:
  • Question forms
  • Deductive and expressive reasoning
  • Describing:  Sometimes I play it where we have to describe what the other person is without using the verbal label.
  • Perspective taking:  A lot of my kids have trouble understanding that the picture on their head is DIFFERENT than the picture on my head.  They also have to work on not stating what I am when giving me clues or answering questions

Making Masks:
You could follow up by having the children make masks.  I usually go with the paper plate variety.  However, these printable masks by Bessie Pooh at Etsy are SO cute.  They are on my wishlist  for fun prizes and reinforcers.

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