January 29th, 2020

Well, it turns out it did take me over a week to get out our next Activity of the Week. It has been a busy time at Grow, as we are GROWing! Two new clinicians have been hired this week, so stay tuned for some "Meet the SLP" entries to get to know the new team members better.
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But, finally and without further delay, here is this week's Activity of the Week. To continue on our snow theme, even though all the snow has been long rained away here in Vancouver, we read Snowmen at Night last week. This is a great book for discussing perspective taking and expected/unexpected behaviour in a fun and silly way. With some of my preschool and early elementary kiddos this week, we did the following extension activities with it:

• Acting out all of the zany things the snowmen did in the book - this is a great way to incorporate some movement into the session after a time of sitting still and reading!
• Answering some inferencing and perspective taking questions about the book:
  • Do you think what the boy imagines really happens at night?
  • What might actually be happening? What is a different possibility?
  • How would you feel if you saw snowmen heading to the park and playing after dark?
  • How would they feel if they saw you watching them?
  • Why do the snowmen drink "ice cold" cocoa?
• Following directions to complete our own "snowmen at night" picture
• Telling our own stories about our snowmen at night. What kinds of silly things did our snowmen do?
• Making play doh snowmen and using them as figurines to tell stories. For some of my younger kids, we used the play doh snowmen to practice building sentences and using verbs. "The snowman is running, the snowman is jumping, etc"

I did read this with a few older kids as well and used it as a jumping off point to make a bio poem. After reading that bio poems ("bio" as in biography) can be a good way to increase perspective taking skills in middle schoolers, I've started to incorporate this into some of our narrative language sessions. We first make bio poems about ourselves and then we work through the template with characters in the books we read. Typically I do this with more serious characters, but this week, we made a bio poem about silly snowmen! :) ​

Stay tuned for the next Activity of the Week!

Thanks for reading, 
​Amanda