Therapy Thursday: Froggy Gets Dressed

I’m attempting a new idea to stream-line my therapy preparations: month long themes. I know these are common in classrooms, but since I see most of my students only twice per week, it makes it much more difficult to carry a theme on for only 3-4 weeks. Plus, there is the added complication of the age ranges from 5-11. Because of the huge range of skills to be worked on with my population, I need to have a vast array of materials.

I’ve decided that at the end of the month, I will take all the file folders and books I’ve used for the month, and file it under “February”. Then next year when February comes around, I’m all set.
February’s theme is “body parts” (cause of the “heart”. get it?)
And although I had to stretch the theme to include “clothes I put on body parts”, I decided to use “Froggy Gets Dressed” as one of February’s books.

Here are all the materials I’ve been using for this story:

Using Boardmaker picture prompts, most of my students can help ask the repetitive question, “What did you forget?” And then choose the clothing item that Froggy forgot and use that in a sentences.

These pictures are laminated and have velcro on the back. They can be used to answer the “What did you forget?” question or used to retell the story with picture by picture words.

My verbal students always practice retelling stories. They brainstorm “first, then, then, and finally” and draw the pictures to help them recall the story elements. Sometimes I video or tape record the retelling for us to analyze.

After we’ve exhausted reading and retelling the story (around the 3rd therapy session on this book), I finally pull out a game. Any of my students that can match pictures, can also play “Froggy Gets Dressed” bingo. Some students use only one word answer to describe the picture, while others are asked to use an entire descriptive sentence. My students who need to work on auditory processing/comprehension need to find the picture without visually matching it first. This can prove tricky.

It’s funny to be doing a book about getting dressed for winter when the crocuses are blooming. But we did have some flurries yesterday morning…