Finding Your TPT Niche

Thanks Teach Speech 365 for throwing this linky party which highlights SLP bloggers interests and areas of speciality.  

I started teacherspayteachers a year ago this month.  My work is primarily with grades 5-8 and also with my school's Life Skills population which may span grades 3-8.  Most of my products are geared towards services with the middle school student and life skills populations.  

Calendar activities: All of our students follow a schedule and have to understand calendars.  It is amazing how many language skills are involved in calendar work: from understanding concepts to sequencing events I realized that a lot of goals could be incorporated into the functional skills of calendar work.  These monthly activities are labor intensive, however, it is worth the effort as I receive great feedback from my buyers and have begun to see major improvements in the skills addressed.  I almost have a year of calendars made and will update these calendars yearly for no fee.  This summer I plan on adding data pages to each month.  

Perspective Taking: I recently traveled to Michelle Garcia Winner's  Social Thinking Clinic in  San Jose to participate in the Social Thinking Mentor Training Program.  I was able to observe Michelle working with adolescent groups of learners with social needs and talk with her about her passion for working with this age group.  This opened up my learning to a world outside of "pragmatic" language and sparked my interest in developing products that address the important areas of safety, problem solving, empathy training, and perspective taking.  Here are a few of my best sellers:  

  

Taking Perspective: Problem solving, empathy training, and perspective taking with situation cards and an emotion bank.
Safebook: Perspective taking and problem solving with social media.  


Figurative Language: I love making these products because idioms and multiple meaning words are so much fun to work with.   I have a spring, summer, and holiday themed figurative language products.  Fall and winter are in the works.  

My new Spring Figurative Language product has multiple meaning words, idioms, personification, similes, and metaphors.  It includes at least two activities for each area as well as black/white printables for easy prep.  Data tracking forms are included for baseline and progress charting.  




Describing and EET Companions: I received a grant last year and was lucky enough to be able to purchase the entire EET system and most of the extras.   The skill of describing is so important in all modes of expressive language and I've made all my activities of descriptive language easily able to be used with Sara Smith's EET.   

Dazzling Daisies comes with bulletin board daisies, printable daisies, cueing daisies, and describing data may be collected in oral and written forms.  

Language Logic: When I worked in the rehab setting I used language logic puzzles to improve critical thinking skills in my CVA and TBI patients.  Language logic activities are hard to come by for the school age population so I made some for my students and decided to sell them on TPT.  I absolutely love working on goals of critical thinking, problem solving, deductive, and inductive reasoning using these activities.  

Sentence Scrambles:  For some reason, most of my middle school students have a really hard time with the Sentence Assembly.  They present with long delays on standardized SLP tests and would have benefited from cues if they were allowable.  I made a variety of sentence scramble products to target this specific skill and have provided a cueing system in these products.  This is one area in which I have student work samples and evidence of improved ability (sometimes hard to find concrete data in our field).  I just tested a student for her triennial and she's moved up two scaled scores in this area!

 My Spring Sentence Scramble has been one of my go-to tasks.  They are so easy to pull off the shelf and work with groups of students.  You may use the writing paper (included) or have students use dry erase boards to sequence their sentences.  When they are finished, students just pass their scrambled sentence on to the next person in the group.  This gives me the opportunity to individually check-in with students, provide cues (cueing system included), and chart data.  

These are the primary areas in which I have multiple products in my store.   Thanks for hanging out with me and make sure to go back to Teach Speech 365 for more from your favorite TPT authors.