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Mr. Berkelbach’s Classroom Edit display name

  • Union Middle School
  • Sandy, UT
  • More than a third of students from low‑income households

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In the special needs cluster classrooms (accommodated core and extended core) speech-language therapy is often provided in the context of play to facilitate language and keep students engaged. In many of my expressive and receptive language based lessons I utilize videos and images of the popular video game characters from Super Mario Bros. I use theses characters to teach foundational language concepts including grammatical markers, prepositions, basic concepts, story telling/sequencing, and core vocabulary. Students are highly engaged by animated gifs and videos these characters I find online. They expand their language by explaining what they are doing ("Mario is jumping over the block"). The videos I find and images I create generate rich language learning opportunities and help these students achieve their speech-language goals. The Nintendo Switch would offer these students opportunities to manipulate the characters themselves and increase their language by explaining what the characters are doing (in real time). It would also be a very fun and rewarding way for students to target their language goals. Nintendo motion control will allow students to be active and actually perform the tasks in the game. For example in a lesson where we would be targeting sequencing and grammar. In the game Mario Party there are different tasks to complete and the student would describe the sequence, "I was Mario. "First we washed the windows, next we raced on the horses, and last we went to the pirate ship". That would target IEP language goals such as 1. sequencing, 2. past tense, 3. prepositions. 4. subject verb agreement 5. short term memory recall. 6. vocabulary. I believe this resource can be a very valuable and engaging learning tool for my students.

About my class

In the special needs cluster classrooms (accommodated core and extended core) speech-language therapy is often provided in the context of play to facilitate language and keep students engaged. In many of my expressive and receptive language based lessons I utilize videos and images of the popular video game characters from Super Mario Bros. I use theses characters to teach foundational language concepts including grammatical markers, prepositions, basic concepts, story telling/sequencing, and core vocabulary. Students are highly engaged by animated gifs and videos these characters I find online. They expand their language by explaining what they are doing ("Mario is jumping over the block"). The videos I find and images I create generate rich language learning opportunities and help these students achieve their speech-language goals. The Nintendo Switch would offer these students opportunities to manipulate the characters themselves and increase their language by explaining what the characters are doing (in real time). It would also be a very fun and rewarding way for students to target their language goals. Nintendo motion control will allow students to be active and actually perform the tasks in the game. For example in a lesson where we would be targeting sequencing and grammar. In the game Mario Party there are different tasks to complete and the student would describe the sequence, "I was Mario. "First we washed the windows, next we raced on the horses, and last we went to the pirate ship". That would target IEP language goals such as 1. sequencing, 2. past tense, 3. prepositions. 4. subject verb agreement 5. short term memory recall. 6. vocabulary. I believe this resource can be a very valuable and engaging learning tool for my students.

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