Teletherapy Materials: Making Board Games in Power Point

This process is for making your own materials for personal use ONLY—not for making materials to sell! Click below for a FREEBIE game board with movable pieces!

1.      Open Power Point.

2.      Delete text boxes that automatically come up on a new slide.

3.      Click on Design tab at the top. Go all the way to the right and select Slide Size.

4.      Chose Standard Size for more of a square look or Widescreen for a more elongated look.

5.      Next, choose Format Background.

6.      To add some interest, I use backgrounds from Pexels or Pixabay. Choose Picture or texture fill then select Insert from Picture Source. I like to slide the transparency bar over to make the background a little more transparent.

7.      Then insert shapes to form your game path. Go to the Insert tab at the top and find shapes. Select the shape you like, such as a rectangle. Change the color to coordinate or stand out from your background. Select shape outline to add an outline. You can also choose the color and thickness of the outline. Once you have a shape you like, copy and paste several times and create a path from Start to Finish.

8.      If you want to align your path shapes more, use the align tools to get a look you like. To center your new path on your background, select all of the shapes, then move them together as a group.

9.      Write directions or words in the boxes. For example, you can write START, END, AHEAD 1, BACK 1, or specific words or directions in your pathway boxes. Once you create a path you like, you can use it over and over with different backgrounds and customize it with different target words or sentences. Another trick is to select the Shape, Go to Shape Fill, then select picture. You can add a picture from your own files or go to the image search and grab an image online. If you choose to add online images, DO NOT TRY TO SELL YOUR GAMEBOARD. THIS WOULD BE A COPY WRITE VIOLATION. If you are planning on making products to sell, that is a whole different ballgame!

10.  Once you have your power point slide the way you like it, save it and label it something like Power Point Game Slides. That way, whenever you need to make a new game, you have a template.

11.  Next, save it again as a PDF. I prefer to save my PDF’s in Adobe Acrobat Reader. This allows me to add stampsto my game board as movable game pieces.

FREEBIE PDF GAMEBOARD

Telepractice Materials: Learning to Make Your Own

Providing teletherapy comes with many challenges and many rewards. As I have stated before, telepractice is not for wimps. If you are a school SLP, you are already versed in clawing your way over walls and finding ways to solve seemingly impossible or unreasonable problems. Sad but true. School SLP’s are problem solvers. Wall climbers. Public relations specialists. Sometimes it feels like we have to fight our way to be able to work with our students. Again, sad but true. Teletherapy is a service provision model that exercises all of these skills. As you transition or begin to regularly include telepractice services as part of your new normal, you may end up falling in love with the experience. Or not. Either way, you will grow your expertise and push yourself in new ways. It can be especially exhausting at first—both mentally and physically. It took me a full three years to cross the Rubicon to arrive at a place where I consider myself a teletherapist. I am confident I will never return to face-to-face therapy.

Teletherapy: Feeling Comfortable is a Process

To my newbie teletherapy co-professionals--try to take a breath. Allow yourself to step back and synthesize what has been placed at your feet. What are you asking of yourself? What is your school district asking of you? Are these expectations reasonable? Could these expectations potentially violate your license?  I disclose that I worked as an SLP in brick-and-mortar schools for over 26 years and have been a telepractioner for 3 years. When I started in teletherapy, the learning curve was steep and fraught. That hasn’t changed. In the beginning, one big frustration was that I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I didn’t know what questions to ask or even how to put some of my questions into words. I also struggled with wanting to know it all RIGHT NOW and being so frustrated when my brain couldn’t seem to grasp, store, and use everything I was learning, RIGHT NOW. The best teletherapists I know are perpetual learners. Many are self-taught. Many started out with very few, if any, mentors. Teletherapists tend to be a generous group but there are limits. Learning is doing. In other words, as you have your first few sessions, you may have new questions and the space in your brain that holds the unknown stuff about teletherapy will get smaller. It takes time. I swear I kept a big waste basket by my computer during my first of couple telepractice sessions because I was sure I would throw up. Scared. To. Death. Now my waste basket is filled with energy bar wrappers and popcorn kernels. I promise it will get better and better and you will grow your identify as a teletherapist. Seek out smart mentors. Read. Keep a journal and reflect on what you are learning. Make lists of questions and seek your own answers. Listen to pod casts. Join SIG 18. Document your concerns. Document everything. Keep learning. Most importantly, push yourself to provide a high-quality service, know HIPAA laws, and do all you can to protect the private health information of your students.

Teletherapy: Do a book study!

I spent 12 years as a literacy coach. Yes, I am an SLP. Believe me, I received some smug puzzled looks from teachers when I bounced into their classrooms as their coach for the year. My favorite reaction from a classroom teacher was always, “You’re just an SLP. How are you going to coach me?” Being an adept actress. I would often look at them apologetically and say, “I know. I am just an SLP. But I noticed your kids in line for lunch. Wow, you have some needy ones. I can definitely help you with your struggling students.” The needs of the kids became our common bond. I actually loved coaching. No IEP’s. No paperwork. No report cards. Just kids. Kids and lessons that promoted access to the curriculum for all students, but most especially the students who were having difficulty. I privately cried a lot my first couple of years as a coach, wondering what the heck I had done to myself. But during that intense decade, I fell in love with using books as tools for learning. I fell in love with revealing to children the writer inside themselves and that their words were powerful and important. Heady stuff. Seeing the learning candle lit was addictive. And so often it was a book, a piece of art, an illustration, or a poem that served as the catalyst. Since returning to speech therapy, and embarking on this journey in telepractice, I felt that pull to bring books into my therapy sessions in a meaningful way. I now use a document camera to read aloud with students while sharing the printed text. One of the books I am using this year with some of my middle and high school students is Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli. The chapters are short and packed with figurative language and great sentences, perfect for analysis and inferential thinking. I created a playlist in YouTube with videos of teachers reading chapters aloud and collected favorite quotes from the book on Goodreads. When I read aloud with students, I write my thinking on sticky notes and use these notes to model questioning, inferring, and synthesizing.  Another book I am using with some upper elementary and middle school students is The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo. I created a playlist in YouTube with video of the author and illustrator talking about the characters and clips from theatrical productions based on the book.  This text also contains short chapters, rich language, and engaging characters. 

Sticky note on text from The Miraculous Journey of
Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo using a document camera.