Chances are, you and your kids have been affected by the coronavirus quarantines happening around the world, and everyone is asking, what do I do with my kids for the next few weeks (maybe months)?!
Young children and special needs children often need many repetitions and consistent lessons in order to retain information, so continuing school lessons is important. However, doing school work at home is much more difficult than it sounds! Making learning fun and motivating is truly the key to success and something I have always used in my practice as a Speech Therapist.
So, to help you out, my team of Speech Therapists, Occupational Therapists, Special Education Teachers, and School Psychologists have decided to share our extensive library of links of free activities with you over the next several weeks. (please keep in mind, that depending on where you live, you may or may not have access to these websites)
I'll start with my personal favorite site that has hundreds of activities:
https://www.quia.com
I've been able to access this one in both the US and Europe. They have an amazing number of educational games made by educators themselves (and you can sign up for the paid version and make your own educational games for your kids!)
click on Visit Quia Web
go to Shared Activities
Here you will find a huge list of subjects, everything from foreign languages, math, science, history, language arts, keyboarding, spelling...and the list goes on.
Once you choose a category, you can narrow your search further by typing in a keyword and choosing the type of activity you want. For example, under Speech Therapy, I can type in comprehension and a whole list of comprehension activities will come up.
Here are some I use a lot:
For Vocabulary building - Categories, antonyms, synonyms, homographs, homophones, multiple meaning words
Comprehension - WH questions, main idea, details, following directions
Figurative Language - idioms, inferences
Critical Thinking/Problem Solving - if...then, analogies, what doesn't belong
Sequencing
Grammar - regular and irregular past tense, regular and irregular plurals, which sentence is correct, pronouns, prepositions, possesives
Social Language - expected and unexpected behavior, feelings
Facts and Opinions
Phonological/Phonemic Awareness
Articulation - of course has all the sounds :)
This will give you a great start! More to come soon :)
Photo by 🇸🇮 Janko Ferlič on Unsplash