I am fortunate enough to have a classroom right next to the bathrooms. This location is noisy but the space is frequently visited by all! The teachers I work with are so dedicated to their instruction time that they use any transition time as an additional learning opportunity.
Who can use an interactive bulletin board?
In my first year on the early childhood campus, our reading specialist had a word wall outside my door. Every day I would sit in my room and marvel at the fact that the teachers were having the kids learn sight words while they were waiting on their friends to get a drink and use the restroom. Genius idea!
So as I began spending more time at my school, it became my goal to put speech and language-worthy activities out there to not only teach the kids basic language skills but to help the teachers identify which kids can and can’t do what.
One December, while searching for Christmas activities for speech therapy on TpT, I came across a free WH question activity made by Elise Onur. After using it in my speech room over a few sessions, I placed the ornaments around a handprint tree outside my door.
I started with WHO and WHAT questions. After a week, I added the WHYs to the interactive bulletin board and REALLY gave them something to talk about!
It makes my heart so happy to be sitting at my desk billing Medicaid or writing IEPs and to hear teachers outside my door encouraging and modeling good language skills for their entire class. You can even practice language skills in line for the restroom!
After you get comfortable adding things to the wall and teachers start using them regularly, you can step up your game with some of the interactive bulletin boards for language that I have now created, several years later.
I’m using interactive bulletin boards for oral language RTI in our hallways now. Here is a Christmas bulletin board version! The vocabulary and questions are hung beside the board for easy access and data collection.
Read more about other language collaborations with teachers in the following posts:
-
- Teaching Vocabulary One Morning at a Time (learning about quilts)
- Learning Vocabulary at Recess (learning about rakes)
Leave a Reply