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Planning push-in language lessons for the classroom environment can be scary! And stressful. You are worried about failing with behavior management and having the time to plan speech therapy lessons. So, today, have an engaging Thanksgiving speech therapy push-in language lesson plan to help you with co-teaching in the special education or general education classroom. The beauty of this Thanksgiving lesson plan is you can re-use it with your mixed small groups.
I have found the most success with doing push-in therapy in the Special Day Classroom setting. I would love to do more push-in for the general education classroom. A big roadblock for me when pushing into the general education classroom is that many students are in different classrooms. So, if I need to see three students at a certain time, I can’t push-in to all their classrooms at that time. And, many times, I didn’t have extra time slots to push-in to three classrooms. But, co-teaching in the general education classroom is doable, as Haylee Ford has shared on the Real Talk SLP podcast. If you want to start pushing into the classroom, try the Special Day Classroom and then branch out to the general education setting.
Typically, when I co-teach with the classroom teacher, I set up our roles and expectations for when I am there. Because the special education classroom has more teachers and instructional aids, I get them involved in running stations and having roles during the lesson.
Each week, when I plan, I do a whole class activity for about 15-20 minutes at their desks or on the carpet in front of the SMARTboard. Then, I break the students into three small groups. I run a group, and the teacher and aid each run a group. This allows us to provide small-group instructions. When planning the activities, I run the language group that is more complex in executing or has many ways to adapt to all the different goals. Below, I will share the Thanksgiving push-in lesson plan following that framework.
Planning themed lessons is so much easier with a book! First, you want to pick any Thanksgiving picture book to read to the class. Here are some ideas of fun Thanksgiving books to use:
If you want to do a turkey-themed unit, many turkey books fit that theme.
After I read the book, as a whole class we did a fabulous brain break dance to Gobble, Gobble, Turkey Wobble. This activity was a way to get the kids out of their chairs and follow the song’s words. If you have students working on social pragmatics, you can have them participate in working on keeping his/her body in the group.
As a whole class, we played a mean game of Simon Says Thanksgiving verb actions. I modified the rules just to have one person telling everyone what action to take. We didn’t play the “Simon didn’t say part”. We acted out the following verb actions:
Plan for the book and carpet whole class activity to take between 10-20 minutes. You can modify this lesson plan to fit a 30 minute time period or a 50-60 minute time period.
After we do the 20-minute whole-class lesson, I break the students into smaller groups. The teacher, instructional aid, and I each run a different station. I usually take the activity that I know how to adapt to all my students’ goals. At my station, I try to collect some data on the students’ performance.
For my station, we watched this super fun Thanksgiving-themed Simon’s cat video. You need to start using these wordless short videos if you have not heard of them!
I used this video to target a lot of verbs and story sequencing. The first time we watched it, I modeled a variety of verbs with the present progressive verb tense using implicit grammar strategies.
I have been reading some research that says when we target a variety of verbs with a specific morpheme marker, we can help increase generalization.
During this lesson, I used conversational recasting during the video with my students. If the student said, “cat take”, I would recast the student’s production with “The cat is taking the food.” With conversational recasting, you take the student’s utterance and model it for them with the correct grammar form.
And, my Fall and Thanksgiving Simon’s Cat speech therapy cheat sheets help cover wh-questions, inferencing, story elements, verbs and articulation!
For the second station, students practiced learning Thanksgiving-themed verbs playing a lively game of memory using magnetic wands. I just put paperclips on the cards and kids got to pick cards using my magnetic wand. Students simultaneously worked on turn taking and following the social rules for a game.
We used the verb cards from my Thanksgiving grammar and vocabulary activities. The instructional aid ran that station.
For the last station, I had the classroom teacher do some structured drill practice of third-person singular and work on identifying verbs.
After they finished with the drill activity, the kids got to play with my Can You Find It? Fall sensory bin.
