Question of the Day!

One of my favorite parts of the day is a language exercise we do as a class called Question of the Day. Years ago we had about a ten minute instructional gap after tooth brushing that we needed to fill with a meaningful activity. Because expressive and receptive language development is an enormous part of what we work on throughout the day (it is ingrained in EVERY moment of our day!), I thought that a fun, targeted language activity would be a productive addition to our programming.  So Question of the Day was born! 

Our Question of the Day board changes monthly- each day has a question that staff can pose to students or peers/students can pose to each other. 

 Here's a close-up of some of the questions you might find on a typical day!

 Tuesdays and Thursdays are our "Describe the Picture" days. We use Visualizing and Verbalizing strategies to encourage students to use both receptive and expressive language skills to describe a scene. We talk about the sounds, colors, people, smells, etc. of the environment pictured. I love that we have general education peers in our room for this activity. It's enormously helpful for our kids to have peers modeling language skills- way more effective than hearing teachers do it!

 Sometimes our Question of the Day gets wild and crazy...

Here are some pictures from a particularly fun question: "How tall are you?"

The kids were tasked with finding each other's height then reporting it to the group.

The kids were very enthusiastic about this assignment- we have a great group of peers at this time who helped!

So much fun!

 It's always exciting to find new ways to stimulate language in our kiddos- especially when the kids don't realize they're putting in work!