Put Your iPhone Camera to Work: Creating Stories for Your iPad

I love to make stories for my students using my iPhone and photo editing apps. It's really easy! Let me show you how I do it.

Every fall, three little gnome brothers turn up in my speech room to play. If you'd like to see the magical gnome home I created last fall, read this post. Each day, the kids arrive to find those industrious gnomes playing with our toys. This is how I made a story to record all the little gnomes' antics. I wrote this story to specifically target the pronoun "he" and regular past tense verbs.

I started by taking pictures every day of the gnomes posing with their toys.  After a week or two, I had enough pictures to make a story.

I load the pictures onto my computer and open the Picasa app.

I select a picture and then click on the "text" icon on the left side of the screen.

I type the text directly onto the picture. You can choose from a variety of fonts, colors and sizes. Then I click "apply" to save the changes to the picture.

I click the little green symbol above the red circle to hold the completed picture in the tray along with the others I want to add to my story. When I have the ones I need, I save them as an album.

Next, you have options of what you want to do with your story. You can save this file to iPhoto and just view the pictures on your phone or iPad, just like you would with any photographs. But I like to save mine to Dropbox so I can open the file and view just the photos in the file and so I can share the Dropbox link with families.  Here's what I do:

First I save the album to my desktop. Next, I choose the file from my desktop, and then click on "Move to Dropbox".

Once the file is in Dropbox, I can open it on my iPad or my iPhone and view the story, swiping the screen to turn the pages.

See? Wasn't that easy? There are probably many other ways to edit your photos to make a story, but this one really works well for me. I love that I can share the links with parents and that they can access them anonymously. The kids really enjoy them, too.  It's a great way for them to share about speech/language therapy with their families at home and practice their speech and language targets while doing so!

Take Out Topics for Articulation Carryover

One of the hardest things I face as a speech-language pathologist is coming up with effective ways to get my students to generalize their articulation skills to their spontaneous speech.  Anyone else find this difficult???  It seem that they master their sounds in structured treatment activities and even during games, but yet they struggle to make that final leap to using them all the time.  Frustrating!  Here's one thing I'm trying:

Take Out Topics for Articulation Carryover is designed to help students generalize newly mastered speech sounds to their spontaneous speech by using structured conversation topics.

Students bring home a takeout box filled with cards that help facilitate use of their target sound in conversation, along with a Helpful Hints page for parents that explains how to use them.  The cards look like this:

***As of July 2016, this product has been re-designed. Same content, new look! Read on...

Each card either asks a question or instructs the student to tell about certain objects.  Target words are highlighted in blue.  The student takes out one card at a time from the box and reads the card, being careful to use the target sound correctly.  The student then answers the question, again concentrating on saying the target words correctly.

The cards are meant to be a starting point for a conversation around a topic.  Encourage the student to add more to the conversation by asking questions about the topic or sharing the student's opinion about or experience with the topic.

The parent or SLP using this activity should try to have the student use the target words as many times as possible in their responses for each card.  Many of the cards instruct the reader to start or end with a particular phrase, but some do not.  For the ones that do not, try to suggest phrases or sentences to use to help facilitate more opportunities for target use. For example, the card in the photo above instructs the student to tell three things about a golfer and a skater.  You could instruct the student to use separate sentences for each detail and to begin each sentence with, "A golfer/ice skater..."

I send home 10 cards at a time rather than filling the box with 30 cards all at once.  I also practice some of the cards with the child during our treatment sessions so he or she will be familiar with the topic and (hopefully) be more successful when this topic is drawn from the box at home.

This set targets vocalic /r/ in the final position of words and is available at my TPT site.  It includes 30 conversation starter cards, instructions for use, labels for the box and a Helpful Hints page for parents or professionals.  Chinese takeout boxes are readily available at craft stores such as Michaels and usually cost around a buck apiece.  You could use any small box or envelope if you don't have a takeout box...it just won't be as fun.

Guess what?  You gave me feedback, and I listened!  Due to popular request, I made a set of cards for the /ch/ sound that are ready to go!  This set contains 40 cards:  20 initial /ch/, 10 medial and 10 final.  You can find it here.  I'm working on other card sets, too, so check back again soon.

What do you think of this idea?  I'm planning to make more for other sounds and word positions, but I'd like to know what you would use.  Please leave a comment and I'll see what I can come up with.

Have fun!

Pam

Ideas for Home Projects Using Tapikeo HD App

I'll admit it...I just can't get enough of my Tapikeo HD app!  I've been using it with my families for "homework" projects.  Let me tell you how.

The first activity is one that I've been doing with my itty-bitties.  It's called "Where's Mommy?" and I use it for working on family member names, vocabulary building, and early concepts.  I also use it for my CAS kids at the VC level in the Kaufman program.  I send them home with the instructions to take pictures of various family members demonstrating the concepts I want to teach, as well as close-up pictures of each family member.  After I receive the photos from the family, I import them into a Tapikeo grid.  I made a grid as a template, which you can download at the end of this post, to help me organize my story.  This is what the grid looks like:

The words and the background color in each cell of the template disappear when a new photograph is added, so you can put a picture of Daddy in a cell that has a different family member's name and no one will ever know!  As I said, the template is just to help me organize my story.  You can add your own words to each cell by typing in the "text" box.  My kids love this story, and it generates a TON of language.

If you would like to use this template, you can download it here:


The next idea I'd like to share is to make stories about individual concepts.  Here is one Charlie and I made together.  I made the orange slide using Microsoft Word and saved it as a PDF.  I imported it to my iPad, and then used it as the first cell of a new story.

Then Charlie and I used objects around my office to demonstrate the concept of "between".  I took photos of him directly from the app (as I've explained in earlier posts) and then recorded Charlie using the word "between" in a sentence.

Press "new" to take a picture, then record voice.

Charlie said, "The bear is between my arms."

We completed seven different examples of demonstrating "between" for this story, and then played it back.  Charlie was so proud and really learned the concept well.   I  exported this story to his iPad at home, and asked him and his mom add to it using items from around his house.  I can't wait to see what they add!

I made a generic "cover page" for this story that you can download here if you want to make one, too: My Story of "Between".


Another great idea:  Charlie's mom purchased this app and promptly put it to use to work on his articulation skills.  She knew we were working on the /l/ sound in the final position of words, so she and Charlie found objects around their house and made a story of Charlie saying words that end in /l/.

I hope you're using this app.  It has so many amazing possibilities!

Nice chatting with you,

Pam