It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Superheroes Week in Speech!

Every Fall, it's the same drill for me.  I anxiously take out all my apples and pumpkins plans the first week in September and delve into one of my favorite seasons.  Inevitably, three weeks pass and I am tired of apples and I have run out of pumpkin ideas to make it to Halloween.  This year, I think I have learned my lesson because I have decided to keep my Fall motif packed away for a couple weeks while we delight in superheroes.  Thanks to my blogger friends, a dash of my own creativity, and my son's Dollar Tree super hero figures, I have a pretty comprehensive collection for lesson plans.

First up, I have not one, not two, but three Batman and Spider-Man units from the incredible Jenna at Speech Room News, who incidentally is a superhero herself in the speech community.  You can grab all of these freebies from Jenna at this link.

I love that I can target following 1-2 step directions with Batman-

Comparing and Contrasting with Spider-Man-

Positional concepts and Speech Articulation with Spider-Man-

Moving right along, yet another speechie superhero, Jenn from Crazy Speech World put together this freebie using adorable graphics of Batman and Robin for word association play.  Snag Jenn's freebie here.

This was a good start, but I needed more materials for my younger clients so I took a drive to my local thrift shop and found a superhero memory game for language lessons.

I also snagged a giant, three-segmented flip book to create silly superheroes.  I love these flip books for working on concepts: top/middle/bottom and first/next/last.

After the thrift shop, I went two doors down to a Dollar Tree and found a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle number puzzle and sticker collection.  I will probably use these to work on sequential concepts, making patterns, and descriptive story telling.

I saved the best for last- my superhero figure guessing game cup.  I made this using an empty food container and my Avengers duck tape.  I wanted to be sure that the kids could not see through the cup so I cut an opening in the shape of a comic strip BOOM/POW star-like image and colored one side black.  I made sure that little hands could reach into the container via the cut lid without getting scratched by rounding off sharp edges. To play this game, we will first look at a picture of an action figure and use descriptive words to highlight costumes and traits.   Next, we will try and use our hand to dig into the container and retrieve the correct match.  I will probably add some recall to the activity by challenging clients to remember the order of superheroes drawn from the cup without looking at the figures lined up on the table.

You can find more lesson plans at my Pinterest Superheroes board.  I hope that you are all having a great start to the school year!