Speech 2U

Once you reach them, you can teach them.

Ready, Set, Action Verbs: FREEBIE!

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I realized that my freebie tab at the top of my page doesn’t work.  I tried to highlight some of my free stuff on my 10,000 page view page.  Maybe I will figure it out this summer-although the warm weather makes it difficult for me to concentrate.

I really enjoy using the Tensebuilder App by Mobile Education to help teach verb tenses with my clients.  As we were doing it, I thought about how fun it would be to personalize this to each client.  It was equally motivating to kids with morpho-syntactic difficulties, children on the autism spectrum disorder and children with Down Syndrome.  You could even choose your verb list based on phonemes to make it a fun articulation activity!

Here’s how I did it:

1.  Start by getting permission from the parents to videotape their child.  For this video, I used my dog and an action figure.  No permission needed!  My dog Maxx recently ate a really cute pair of red sandals so I’m trying to humiliate him by posting this picture on my blog.  I don’t think it will help.

2.  Start by video taping the child doing a variety of actions.  It works best to have them spend about 5 seconds to start, 5 seconds to do the action and 5 seconds to finish the action.  This is a great way to practice verb vocabulary!  It was interesting to see if they understood the word or if they needed me to model this.  
3.  I used iMovie to edit the videos.  You can read about how to edit in iMovies here. 
4.  Depending on what you want to work on, there are two ways I would recommend editing the videos.

Adding just the verb title to practice expressive use:  

You can edit this with your client.  Show them the video and ask what they did.  Add the title by double tapping on the video at the bottom.  Once the video is published, you could watch it-and cue like this:

Me:  What will the dog do?  
Child A: The dog will jump.
Pause as the dog is jumping; 
Me: What IS the dog doing?
Child A: The dog is jumping.
Pause after: 
Me: What did the dog do?
Child A: The dog jumped.  
Fantastic.  Child A is ready for discharge-no cues needed.  

Adding subtitles to teach verb tenses:  
Another way to use these videos is to add subtitles in for each future, present and past tense.  This can help teach the child in real time how we use different verb tenses.  It works really well if you have Hyperlexic clients or clients who can read.  For nonreaders, I would say the action as they are doing it.  
If you want to add in subtitles, you will need to trim each clip to add the header.  
For example: 
I selected just the part of the video where Hulk is standing on Batman’s cave.  I added the title: “Hulk will fall.”  
Then I selected the part of the video where Hulk is falling.  I added the title, “Hulk is falling.”
Finally I selected the last part of the video and added the title, “Hulk fell.”
After your videos are finished in iMovie, you can go to the home page to share the movie on iTunes, your camera roll or YouTube.  Just make sure if you are using YouTube that you set the video to private.  
Here is my final movie project:  
I also created a freebie with some cute Movie Clappers and suggestions for good verbs to use.

You can find Ready, Set, Action Verbs on my Teachers Pay Teachers store.

If you try this I’d love to hear what you thought about this project!

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