I love, love, LOVE children's books! Working in the high school setting, I feel deprived. I don't get the opportunity to use them and develop fun thematic activities around them...so sad! Enter the book...
Butterflies in My Stomach and Other School Hazards, written by Serge Bloch! This book, as well as others by Serge Bloch, is funny, challenging, and totally cute...um, I mean cool. Anyways, let's get into it...
Here is a lesson designed for a collaborative speech-language session within the classroom setting, although it can be used in any service delivery format (e.g., group). At the high school, we try to do as much intervention in the classroom setting as possible. The reasons for this are: 1) the classroom is a relatively more natural context for many of the skills we are developing; 2) it assists in developing greater communication between teachers and staff regarding our students needs and how we can better support our teachers and staff; 3) teachers are involved in implementing strategies and techniques to facilitate better communication and assist in promoting generalization and carryover; 4) it allows us to better support the curriculum; 5) we have found that there is greater "buy-in" by teachers and staff because they are able to see what we do, it becomes a team effort; 6) students love remaining in their classroom and receiving intervention among their peers (some high schoolers despise being pulled out of class for "speech"); and 7) many other great reasons!
This lesson is great for the new school year. The theme is figurative language. Although the illustrations in this book may look a bit juvenile, the language is challenging for many of our high school students, especially those with autism spectrum disorders. In fact, each page of this book contains 1-2 figurative expressions. Here are a few of the expressions in this book:
- wrong side of the bed
- heart-to-heart
- best foot forward
- in a pickle
- under the weather
- up a creek
- can of worms
- and many more!
For this lesson in particular, I scanned each page of the book and compiled it into a powerpoint presentation so that the entire class could follow along via the projector. As we read the story, we stop to discuss each idiom or expression. I have found that many of our students struggle with the concepts literal vs. figurative. If these concepts are too difficult for your students to grasp, focus on using the pictures and plenty examples in your explanation. For example, I typically ask, "I am a very busy bee today because I have three meetings, an appointment, and tons of therapy to do before I go home. Am I really a bee? Do I have yellow and black stripes? Do I have a stinger (that would be pretty cool!)? Do I fly around school (somedays it feels like i do!)?" To facilitate greater comprehension, ask the students about times when they have had butterflies in their stomach, woken up on the wrong side of the bed, been in a pickle, etc. You can even be more specific and provide examples that perhaps the students can relate to, such as, "Who has felt nervous, or had butterflies in their stomachs, on the first day of school?" I have found that students love sharing their own experiences with the class and it gives us a chance to repeatedly talk about/use the expressions.
We included a
worksheet which you can use to review a few of the expressions mentioned in the book or send home for homework. You can even write a few common idioms or expressions on the board and have students draw their own interpretation of the expression. Have fun with this activity and let us know how it turned out!
The lessons my students love involve movie or TV show clips. For this particular lesson I use the first Diary of a Wimpy Kid (2010) movie, and I have the students watch (from scene selection on the menu) the scene that begins with the junior high marquis, and I show it until they are walking home from school after their first day of junior high. As the students watch I have them reference the worksheet below and put simple (+) or (-) in the column on the right to indicate if the behavior is something that is "ok" or "not ok" behavior for various school scenarios. Click on the link below for the worksheet.
