Bilingual Speech & Language : Dream Snow

I've been meaning to write a blog post, but my phone decided to reset itself and deleted ALL of my pictures! I had some great pictures of the work we've been doing in the speech room. Yesterday I was able to snap a few pictures of the items that were finished.

In my speech room we have been very busy trying to get some fun activities completed before winter break. ONE, JUST ONE MORE WEEK before break! But who's counting? ;) I have been using the book, Dream Snow by Eric Carle for the past two weeks. I love this book! It's an adorable book about a farmer who has five animals and a tree. The farmer dreams of snow and when he wakes up it's actually snowing! The book has transparency sheets that hide the animals under the snow. The kids loved guessing who was under the snow and were even more excited when they lifted the transparency sheet to reveal the animal! Once the farmer sees the snow, he quickly runs out of his house with a sack full of items. Read the book to find out what's inside the sack.

Here is how I used the book in speech: I read the book to each group and when a transparency sheet came up, each student gave me a sentence to guess which animal was under the snow. I expanded on each animal by having the students describe the animal. I targeted several wh-questions such as "which animal says moo? What do horses eat?" The farmer resembles Santa Clause so when we got to the page with the farmer and his sack, I had the students predict what the farmer was going to do and what he had in the bag. Most of them said it was Santa getting ready to deliver presents :) I also had them tell me why they thought it was Santa. We also sequenced the story using sequencing cards I created on LessonPix. After reading the book, I had the students create their own "dream snow" by drawing a picture and using 3-5 sentences to describe what was hiding under the snow. I targeted using grammatically correct sentences during this mini-writing activity. The kids were enjoying this activity so much that I couldn't get several of them to go back to class! There were tons of giggles while the students read their clues to their peers and hearing all the different guesses was entertaining.