Board Games and Speech Therapy: Who Would Win

And I’m back after a long hiatus (major interferences involved a very interesting year or so at work and a baby).

This week, I’ll be looking at a party game that was originally released by Gorilla Games and now published by Gamewright, Who Would Win?

Description: In this party game, two players are each given a fictional or historical character (Darth Vader, Albert Einstein, etc). Then, a moderator reveals a card from an event deck (figure skating, gardening, pie eating, etc). Each player has 20 seconds to explain why their character would win at that event. The moderator chooses a winner, and players switch roles.

Variants: There’s an iOS version of this game. It doesn’t appear to be made by either publisher of the card game, so you may encounter different figures and/or events, but it’s the same concept.

Skill Supports:
-Comparison: Comparing two people is a fundamental part of the game.
-Agent/Action Relationship: This game requires students to synthesize at least the “who” and “what” of a scene, likely adding in the “how” and “why” as well.
-Inference: The game requires students to take a person they know something about and apply it to a context that the person (probably) isn’t involved in. How would Michael Jordan’s basketball expertise help him in a sailing competition? Does Marie Curie’s remarkable scientific mind help her sing?

Strengths:
-Supports wide range of players: If the clinician acts as moderator, this game can support as few as two players or as many as eight.
-Narrative comparison: Who Would Win taps into a skill that many speech impaired students have a hard time with – comparison – and approaches it from perspectives that almost all kids are familiar with – competition and storytelling.
-Easily adapted – If you’ve got lesson plans in advance, it is not difficult to modify the event deck or the character deck to include events or characters from your students’ lessons. Class studying civil rights for Black History Month? Forcing kids to think outside the box and explain why Harriet Tubman would beat Malcolm X at a science fair could help improve understanding of both iconic figures in US History. (And now I want to see the poster presentation for Tubman’s project, “Can natural terrain features be used to fool scent-following hunting dogs?”)

Challenges:
-Background Knowledge Required: If you don’t know who Albert Einstein is, you won’t be able to argue why he’d be better than anyone at sheep herding.
-Limited Time: Students who process information slowly or stutter will have difficulty with the 20-second time limit.
-Favoritism in Voting: The rules of the game ask all players not involved in the debate to sit on a “jury” of voters. There’s a significant risk for students who are not popular to do poorly regardless of what they say.

Accommodations/Modifications:
-Throw Away The Timer – Untimed response is usually better in therapy anyway.
-Player-Chosen Characters – If you don’t mind getting an in-depth knowledge of Miley Cyrus or Kim Kardashian (and honestly, if you did, what were you thinking working with kids?), let students pick their own person to argue about before introducing the event. Just be careful of that kid who can make Batman work for anything.
-Adapt to Curriculum – We discussed above the possibility for a custom deck for Black History Month. The same would work for a deck of characters (or events) based on stories read in an ELA class and events/characters in a social studies class, and you could even stretch to make event decks based on things like health concepts (who’s better at CPR – Benjamin Franklin or Lassie?).

Alternate Uses:
-The character cards can be used to create a “person-only” game of Apples to Apples, or even as a text-only approach to Dixit.
-The game in general can be played in the style of Apples to Apples, with the judge holding a scenario and each player playing the character they think would win. This would keep a greater number of students consistently engaged in the session.

Overall, this game is one of the strongest games for high school students with language impairments that I’ve encountered (and they’re a hard group to shop for). It’s also especially adaptable to general education curriculum concepts, which is important as more states adopt Common Core and SLPs are encouraged to push into the classroom. It’s not the easiest game to find right now, but if you can locate a copy, I highly recommend it.

-John

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Board Games and Speech Therapy: Storyteller Cards (Contest Included!)

Today, rather than writing a post about a single board game, I’m going to write about a tool for creating games and therapy activities: Storyteller Cards by Jason Tagmire. The project is currently raising funds on Kickstarter (for people unfamiliar with Kickstarter, it’s a site where creators of small-scale projects can raise funds for their creative endeavors using a “crowdfunding” model instead of a traditional investment model – patrons pledge funds toward the project in exchange for a reward from the project creator, usually a physical product).

Storyteller Cards

General Overview: From the tool’s Kickstarter page: “Storyteller Cards is a deck of 54 playing cards that each feature 4 unique elements. There is a CHARACTER, holding an ITEM, completing an ACTION, in a LOCATION. Each of these elements can be used to create something new, get you out of a mid-project slump, or just to have some creative fun with family and friends. The cards also feature additional icons in the corners to help you dig a little deeper into storytelling, creating, and gaming. The icons represent a RANK, SUIT, MOOD,SEASON, LETTER, and COLOR.”

The cards themselves come with a Storyteller Manual that contains a number of games that are being revealed as the Kickstarter campaign progresses. Games described so far include Once Upon A Time (not the card game I discussed in an earlier post, but a Mad Libs-style story completion game), the Comic Challenge (a collaborative story-drawing game), To Be Continued (a story-building game in the spirit of the Storybook Game), Possibilities (a free-form card game where the players write the rules as they play), ChromaCards (a strategic crayon coloring game), and Short Stories (a game of my own design in which players use the elements of the cards to tell a story that resolves a storyteller-created conflict). There are still other games yet to be revealed, including  Director’s Cut (a game where the players create their own film using 8 cards from the deck). Some of the games work best with notepads that can be purchased with the cards, but they all work with only the deck of cards and the PDF manual that comes with the kit (some printing of worksheets may be required or desired).

Skill Support:

• Vocabulary – There are very few games included with this kit that do not involve identifying at least one property of the cards, whether the character, action, setting, item, or something else.
• Problem Solving – Most of the games (especially Short Stories) require the student to provide some sort of solution to a problem.
• Narrative Sequencing – As the name implies, Storyteller Cards are primarily about storytelling, and whether you’re building a story with each card as a piece like in To Be Continued or Director’s Cut or using a single card to build an entire story like in Comic Challenge, building a cohesive narrative is a useful skill.

Strengths:

• Flexible – Because Storyteller Cards were designed as a tool rather than a specific game, an enterprising and creative SLP can find ways to integrate them into most therapy contexts.
• Low Literacy Friendly – Each Storyteller Card has two letters on it, and those letters are in a corner of the card. Having literacy skills is not a requirement for most activities that use Storyteller Cards.
• Fun For All Ages – The activities in the Storyteller Manual are designed for students of all ages and ability levels. The project creator has used Storyteller Cards with his five-year-old daughter, and some of the games in the Storyteller Manual can be made complex enough for high school students.

Challenges:

• Clinician-facing – As a tool rather than a game (although there are games included), Storyteller cards are exactly as useful as the clinician using them can make them. A creative clinician can make Storyteller Cards an indispensible asset, but one who is used to using prescribed activities may have difficulty.
• Distractions – By design, there is a lot going on in each picture and on each card. A student that has difficulty focusing may have a hard time focusing on the card element that the activity is focused on.

Accommodations/Modifications/Alternate Uses: Because Storyteller Cards are a tool rather than a game, describing accommodations, modifications, or alternate uses isn’t really a thing here; the tool is designed to fit a wide variety of activities (especially in the context of language treatment). The Kickstarter campaign does have some add-ons designed to enhance the Storyteller Card experience (notepads to supplement games, interactive pencils, a deck of blank cards for Possibilities, and a print copy of the Storyteller Manual), but with PDFs included in the base pledge level, the add-ons aren’t necessary if you have access to card stock and a printer.

Obviously, I’m a fan of Storyteller Cards, since I contributed to the manual. I think that the toolkit does a lot to improve on and synthesize other games that I’ve talked about in previous posts, like the Storybook Game and Once Upon a Time (and one of the games that may end up in the manual was originally named “Dixit Done Right”). Once this game arrives (estimated ship date is November if the Kickstarter is fully funded), it will be a staple of my traveling therapy kit.

CONTEST! For the first time, I’m offering a contest through this blog. To compete in the contest, you must post in the comments section of this blog post a speech therapy activity using Storyteller Cards. To be eligible, the activity must include its target skill/goal/objective and a brief description of the activity – I’ll try to comment if I need more description. On June 8 (to give non-winners a day to pledge to the Kickstarter campaign), I’ll review all the eligible entries, and the best entry (totally subjective) will get a free copy of Storyteller cards once pledge rewards are fulfilled (estimated delivery November 2013).

-John

Disclosure: The author of this blog post is a contributor to the Storyteller Manual.

Board Games and Speech Therapy: Word on the Street

This week, I have a (relatively) brief post reviewing another Out of the Box game, Word On The Street.

Word on the Street

Variants/Expansions: There is a Junior version of the game, which includes simpler categories and tiles for the entire alphabet (rather than only 17 letters).

General Overview: Word on the Street is a word-based party game designed for 2-8 players of ages 12+ (8+ for the Junior version of the game). Players are presented with a category, name an item in that category, and move the letters used to spell that item toward them in a “tug of war” fashion. Once a letter is moved off one side of the board, that player (or team, if there are more than two players) claims the letter and it cannot be moved again. Once a player or team claims eight letters, that player or team wins.

Skill Support:

• Category Identification – Players need to name items in categories to determine what words they’re spelling.
• Spelling – Word on the Street requires students to spell the words out in order to know what letters to move.
• Phonemic Awareness – As the students work to spell the words, they need to demonstrate or practice phonemic awareness skills.

Strengths:

• Playable “Out of the Box”: This is a game that can be explained and demonstrated with less than five minutes of setup. Modeling game play is easy.
• Variable Challenge Level: Younger students who have a hard time with spelling and/or vocabulary will only be able to create smaller words, but if everyone in the group is at that level, the game’s challenge level, by its nature, adjusts to meet the students’ ability level.
• Multisensory: By physically move the pieces and saying the letter’s name out loud while doing so, a student who has difficulty with spelling or single-modality learning can participate in the activity using visual, kinesthetic, and auditory methods, helping to reinforce concepts.
• Variable Participation: Because this is a game that uses teams, it’s possible to pair two younger or weaker students together against an older or stronger student (or the therapist), allowing the teams to collaborate to give everyone a chance to remain engaged.

Challenges:

• Literacy is required: All the cards have words, and none of the cards (even in the younger versions of the game) have pictures. In addition, spelling the answers is a part of the game, so if spelling is hard for your students, modifications will need to be made.
• Narrow scope: This game is rooted in naming and spelling items in categories. Unlike many Out of the Box games, there isn’t much variability in skills using the components in the box.
• Team game: Because this is a team game, it isn’t as useful for individual therapy unless you participate at the child’s level, which can sometimes make note-taking difficult.

Accommodations/Modifications:

• Therapist participation: The biggest area in which a therapist may need to participate or interfere with the game is to help with spelling. This can be done as a treatment activity by itself to work with phonemic awareness, or done entirely by the therapist to reduce frustration.
• Heavy example use: Using one or two examples of an item that fits into a particular category can really help to jog a student’s memory if he or she is having difficulty.

Alternate Uses:

• The board and letters can be used to add kinesthetic engagement for other tasks with single-word answers.
• The category cards can be combined with a number of other activities to create an entirely different game that reinforces a wide variety of skills.

This game is narrow, but the inherent multisensory and multimodal use of the game’s components make it ideal for the skills it addresses. It’s more popular with my younger students than any other game that requires literacy, and the strategy of trying to think of words that use particular letters keeps older, more capable students engaged.

Has anyone else had experience using this game in therapy? How useful has it been? What other uses and modifications have you used?

-John

Board Games and Speech Therapy: Once Upon a Time

Returning after a long (too long) break, I’m excited to start with more reviews – and super-excited for an announcement related to this blog next week.

If this is your first time here, you may want to go here to the “home” page. It explains a bit about what I’m hoping to accomplish with this series, and lists the games I’ve already reviewed.

This is the first review that I’ve timed to coincide with another event. Once Upon A Time, designed by Richard Lambert, Andrew Rilstone, and James Wallis and published by Atlas Games, is being covered on the board gaming YouTube show TableTop this week (for reference, two other games reviewed in this series that have been covered on TableTop include Dixit and Get Bit! – and beware, TableTop is not always school/work-safe viewing), and since it was already on the “review” list, I moved it up the list – and used the show’s timing to give myself a deadline.

Once Upon A Time

Variants/Expansions: Once Upon a Time is now in its third edition of printing, and has three expansions: Dark Tales, Enchanting Tales, and Seafaring Tales. Each of the expansions adds a slightly different theme (evil creatures and unhappy endings, enchanted princesses, and stories of the sea, respectively). I haven’t tried the expansions, but the added variety should come in handy after using the game in therapy a few times. There are also Create-Your-Own Cards if you want to add cards specific to speech therapy or to your local area.

General Overview: Once Upon A Time is a story-building game designed for two to six players of ages 8 and up. Players are dealt one Happily Ever After card, which details the ending of a fantasy-style fairy tale story, and 5-10 Once Upon A Time cards, which each contain one plot element of a fantasy/fairy tale story. One Storyteller begins to tell the fairy tale, trying to use the Characters, Items, Places, Aspects (adjectives), and Events in his or her hand to tell the story. As the Storyteller uses a plot element on his or her card, the Storyteller plays the card, trying to empty his or her hand of Once Upon a Time cards and end the game with a Happily Ever After card. The other players pay close attention to the story and the cards in their hand, because if the Storyteller uses a plot element that is on one of their cards, then the player can play his or her card and take over the story, becoming the new Storyteller.

Skill Support:

• Story Sequencing – Once Upon A Time requires the player to connect events in a (mostly) logical fashion to form a coherent narrative.
• Divided Attention – When a player is not the Storyteller, he or she needs to pay attention to both the cards in his or her hand and the story the Storyteller is telling, trying to find a place where the two match.
• Imaginative Play – Because this game deals with a fantasy theme, it works well to help a student with limited imaginative play with a structure to support the development of fantasy and creativity.
• Categorizing/Grammar – The cards are labelled with groups (Characters, Events, Places), making it easy to reinforce word categories and parts of speech while playing.
• Expressive Vocabulary – Many of the terms used in the game may be terms that are familiar to the student from listening to fairy tales, but are terms that don’t always come up in spontaneous use. Once Upon A Time encourages students to use these terms in a slightly different context than the context in which the term was learned.

Strengths:

• Easy to demonstrate: While the rules (at least the rules for the second edition of the game, which I have) aren’t spectacular at getting you playing the game quickly, the game is easy to demonstrate once you have a handle on them. This makes the game not quite out of the box, but one that takes minimal time out of a therapy session to teach.
• Antecedent In Popular Culture: While princess movies are on the decline in popularity, there are still enough (especially with the Disney Princess franchise ramping up consumerism) that most children have encountered fantasy themes in their previous experience. Using the same themes in a therapy activity helps to reinforce the therapy skills being targeted.
• Aligned With Common Core ELA State Standards: One of the ongoing challenges of innovation in education is that service providers are being encouraged to draw direct and indirect connections between their services and grade level content expectations, most commonly the English and Language Arts standards in the case of speech pathology. This article from Booklist describes how a number of fairy tale texts can be used to meet Common Core ELA objectives. The philosophy discussed in this article can easily be transferred to Once Upon A Time.
• Useful With Many Age Groups: This probably isn’t a game for kindergarteners with language difficulties, but this game can be used both from students in second or third grade all the way to high school seniors, with the language expectations rising with the students’ ages and performance ability.

Challenges:

• Literacy is required: While the Once Upon A Time cards use words and pictures (which is fantastic), the Happily Ever After cards only have text, requiring that the players either be literate or have assistance finishing the story.
• Tricky Fonts. The font used on the Once Upon A Time cards for the group label (Place, Character, etc) can be difficult to read for students that are not used to script writing – or even some who are). This is greatly improved in the game’s third edition, but be aware of this if you’ve found an older copy at a thrift store or on eBay.
• Distracting Rules. The game has a couple rules and cards that can be really distracting or confusing if a student isn’t ready to process three or four different pieces of information at a time. One such rule says that cards can only be played if its use is important to the story, but doesn’t provide great guidance as to when something would be “mentioned for no reason”. Also, there are Interrupt cards that allow players to take the story away from the Storyteller when the Storyteller plays a card of that type; these cards make for a more interesting game, but they detract from the use of the game’s theme to build of language skills.

Accommodations/Modifications:

• Get rid of the Interrupts: Taking all the Interrupt cards out of the deck has two benefits. First, it allows you to focus more on the narrative aspect of the game without removing much gameplay. Second, it takes away the attention from the part of the card that has the most difficult to read font (if the Interrupts aren’t present, then the card’s group isn’t relevant to game mechanics).
• Made-up Happily Ever After: For students who aren’t literate, you can get rid of the Happily Ever After cards as well, allowing a student to make up their own ending once he or she is out of cards.
• Therapist moderation: “Ground rules” from the therapist or teacher can do a lot to prevent confusion and/or argument about when a card can be played as part of a story. I usually use two ground rules: There can only be one card played in each sentence (a rule from the rulebook), and the card played must “do something” (meaning that it must be an active rather than passive agent in the story).

Alternate Uses:

• Social Stories: Using cards from Once Upon A Time can be used in creating social stories in a number of ways. When the student is first learning social stories, the cards can be used as visual cues for a therapist-created social story. After the student starts to gain proficiency, the clinician and student can work together, with the student creating the base story and the clinician asking questions and adding story elements as needed to guide the narrative. Finally, as the student becomes proficient in understanding the social concepts taught by the social stories, he or she can use cards from Once Upon A Time to demonstrate his or her knowledge (especially useful for students who are weak with verbal language).
• Graphic Organizers: As students begin writing stories on their own, Once Upon A Time cards can be used as tactile graphic organizers to help the student organize his or her thoughts. One of the major challenges of traditional graphic organizers is that it can be difficult to follow characters through actions and interactions, and the ability to use these cards as something of a movable storyboard can help scaffold a student’s writing or story generation.
• Writing Prompts: In addition to scaffolding writing in general, Once Upon A Time cards can be used to create randomized writing prompts for students who have written language objectives. Using a random Character, Item, Aspect, Place, and Event (adding another card or two as the cards call for) can create a large number of unique prompts to save students the monotony of writing and rewriting on the same prompts – and to save you the effort of continuously searching for and printing out new prompts.

In general, this is a good game for speech therapy. The rules could use some improvement, and some modifications to the game can be needed for each individual group. But if you’re not ready to make some modifications to materials to maximize their impact, what are you doing in speech therapy? 😉

-John

Board Games and Speech Therapy: Snake Oil

Hmm. It looks like I haven’t posted in a while. I blame this. Since I’m spending so much time focusing on hobby gaming rather than speech therapy while blogging, today I’m going to dip a little deeper into my “hobby gaming” games – Snake Oil, the latest release from Out of the Box Games.

Variants/Expansions: None.

General Overview: Snake Oil is a word-based party game (and the 2012 Mensa Select Winner) for four to nine players of ages 13 and up (although reviewers are saying children as young as six have had success with the game). Much like in Apples to Apples, players take turns acting as the judge, or “customer”. Each round, the customer draws a customer card, which describes a person looking to purchase a product. These customers are usually generic descriptors like “Cheerleader” or “Bodybuilder”. The other players, the “inventors”, pick two cards out of their hand of six to create a product they are selling to that customer; each card contains a one-word noun like “rumor” or “mirror”, which would be combined to make the product “Rumor Mirror” or “Mirror Rumor”. After making their pitch, the customer chooses the best product and pitch, and that product’s inventor gets a point. The inventors then draw two cards to replace the cards they played, and the player to the customer’s left acts as the new customer for the next round. Once every player has been the customer once, the game ends and the player with the most points wins.

Skill Support:

• Theory of Mind – This game is, hands down, the best Theory of Mind therapy game I have ever seen. Both the Customer and Inventors need to place themselves in the shoes of another person and consider what that person would want or need instead of what they themselves would want and need.
• Literacy – This game features a significant amount of reading at the word level.
• Verbal Reasoning – Since the game includes both the cards played and the pitch, players are encouraged to use verbal reasoning skills in addition to simply determining what cards to play.

Strengths:

• The game is simple: This game requires very little explanation, and modeling play is easy.
• The game is fast: The game, in its basic form, has as many turns as there are players. This allows each Inventor to spend a little more time than usual to create and say their pitch, removing the pressure of a fast answer from a student with processing delays or fluency deficits.
• Wide player range: This game can be used with as few as two or as many as six players with ease, and it can be applied to a variety of ages with some modifications.
• THEORY OF MIND! Again, this is the only game I’ve seen to fully integrate Theory of Mind to this degree. This game is awesome for high-language autistic students who still have difficulty with pragmatics.

Challenges:

• Too brief: A game that lasts only 4-9 rounds may not fill a full session without modification.
• Absent of visual reference: Visual references are not built into this game.
• Unfortunate card interactions: Do you really want to hear a middle school or high school student (especially a boy) try to pitch a “Love Window” to a cheerleader? Me neither.
• Literacy-dependent: Cards with words are hard for kids who can’t read.

Accommodations/Modifications:

• Extended time: Modifying the game’s duration to fit your needs isn’t difficult.
• Visual references: You can add visual references to this game and reduce literacy dependence by replacing the word cards with a set of picture cards (like the ones from this game). It reduces the invention options somewhat, but it’s functional for low-literacy or high-visual students.

Alternate Uses:

• This game can be used without a group as well as with a group. In an individual session, the student can be placed in either the role of Inventor or Customer. A student Inventor could be asked to explain what elements of a product they might pitch to a particular Customer (including differences in pitching the same product to different Customers). A student Customer might be required to generate questions about a product for an Inventor.
• The product combinations themselves can be used as a problem-solving task. What challenges would exist in making a “Rumor Mirror”? What would a “Leash Broom” even look like? Students could ask and/or answer questions about products.
• Using the products in this game as prompts in Telestrations may or may not be useful in therapy, but it’s definitely something I want to try at our next board game night.

The second I heard about this game, I thought about its use for pragmatic language. As I looked more into the game, its uses for expressive language also became clear. It may be that the true value in this game is its use in integrating students with pragmatic language difficulties into sessions, targeting their deficits in a “fun” context where they can be part of a more mainstreamed group – something that’s regularly difficult for students with pragmatic deficits.

Has anyone else had experience using this game in therapy? How useful has it been? What other uses and modifications have you found?

-John

Board Games and Speech Therapy: Scattergories: The Card Game

This week’s game is Scattergories: The Card Game by Winning Move Games.

Variants/Expansions: None.

General Overview: Scattergories: The Card Game is a word-based party game for two or more players of age 8+. The game presents the players with two decks of cards – a category deck and a letter deck – and the top card of each deck is revealed to all players. The first player to slap the “I KNOW” card and provides something that starts with the letter and fits in the category gets to take either the category card or the letter card. That card is replaced, and play starts again. Once one deck is depleted, the player with the greatest number of cards is the winner.

Skill Support:

• Category Naming/Identification/Comparison – Generating items that fit into categories is the game’s core theme and skill.
• Spelling is supported by the game in a minor fashion, as knowing what letter words start with is an integral part of the game.
• Processing Speed – The first person to hit “I KNOW” gets the point, so processing quickly helps you win the game.

Strengths:

• The game is simple: This game requires very little explanation, and modeling play is easy.
• The game is fast: If the players are on target, this is a game that takes less than fifteen minutes to play, and setting a timer (for instance, if you want to use it as a five-minute end-of-session activity) doesn’t interfere with gameplay.
• The game is active: Finding a language-based activity that keeps kids active is somewhat difficult, and this one has a small amount of physical activity built in.
• All participants are constantly engaged: There is no “down time” in this game – every player participates in every turn.
• Low literacy: While the game uses the first letter of each word, if you read the category when first playing it, students with reading difficulties can participate at the same level as readers.
• Wide player range: This game can be used with as few as two or as many as six players with ease, and it can be applied to a variety of ages (don’t believe the box; with modifications, I’ve used this game with kindergarteners).

Challenges:

• Speed/dexterity game: Some students, especially those that receive services from other providers (like OTs or PTs), may not be physically capable of hitting the “I KNOW” card as quickly as other students. Students with processing deficits and/or cognitive impairments may also have difficulty reacting as quickly as other students.
• Runaway scoring: Given the number of cards in the game, it’s possible that one student may start to achieve a large scoring gap, and having a limited ability to catch up before the end of the game can prove discouraging.
• Absent of visual reference: Visual references are not built into this game, and unlike many other games reviewed in this series, there isn’t an obvious fix for substituting in picture cards.

Accommodations/Modifications:

• Get rid of the speed element: Replacing the “first in gets the point” system and replacing it with a turn-taking system gives the physically slower players equal opportunity to participate. This can be done in a couple ways. If you don’t have any other materials, have students take turns providing an answer until only one player can think of something. If you can get ahold of a timer (especially a variable-duration timer like the one in Last Word), giving the point to the last student who could think of an answer before the timer buzzed is also effective. Both of these, though, make the turns last longer and lead to lower scores, which also addressed the “runaway scoring” concern.
• Visual references: You can add visual references to this game by replacing the category cards with a set of picture cards and having the students say something about the picture starting with the letter. This changes the skill focus somewhat (scene or item description is not quite the same as category identification), but it is a way to get more multisensory interaction.

Alternate Uses:

• This is another game that’s usable with the Expanding Expression Tool. While the connection with the EET’s “group” designation is present, both decks of cards can be used to reinforce EET concepts. Use either the category or letter deck to narrow down an EET area (e.g. name something with a certain “where” that starts with a certain letter), or – for students approaching mastery – use both decks in concert with the EET – name something that fits in <category> that starts with <letter> that addresses <EET area>.

This was originally intended to be a limited-use game for my middle school students that were still working on organizing information, but with some of the adaptations listed above, I’ve been able to use it with all ages from kindergarten to 12th grade. It’s not a game that you can bring out with the same group week after week, but using it once in a while is a good way to change the therapy experience and provide some variety to sessions.

Has anyone else had experience using this game in therapy? How useful has it been? What other uses and modifications have you used?

-John

Board Games and Speech Therapy: In A Pickle

The first game for this fall is a comparison game by Gamewright, In A Pickle.

Variants/Expansions: None.

General Overview: In A Pickle is an item-comparing party game designed for 2-6 players of ages 10 and up. Players take turns playing a card on top of one of the four piles with one rule – the newly played card must belong “in” the card it’s played on. This “inness” can be concrete (a toy goes in a box), conceptual (time goes in a clock), or outright bizarre (a galaxy goes in a sandbox – if the galaxy is the galaxy on the cat’s collar in Men In Black). If a play seems not to fit, the player has the opportunity to justify their answer before it is put to a table vote. Once a pile has four cards, each player has one more chance to “trump” the last played card before the player who completed the pile gets the set. At the end of the game, the player with the most sets is the winner.

Skill Support:

• Item Description/Relationships – On the most concrete level, you can win at this game using what goes “in” something else in a containment sense.
• Literacy – This game features a significant amount of reading at the word level.
• Figurative Language – To excel at this game, a player needs to be able to use imagination, idioms, and figurative language to fit things inside other things.

Strengths:

• The game is simple: This is a game that can be played out of the box with less than five minutes of setup and rules explanation. Modeling game play is easy.
• Player Engagement/Interaction: Where many games have players only play on their turn, the voting on other players’ turns keeps all players engaged.
• Encourages Creativity: The use of comparative language (in this case, size comparisons) provides an easily understood framework in which students can play with language – figurative and otherwise – relatively safely.

Challenges:

• Literacy is required: All the cards have words, and none of the cards have pictures. Students who have difficulty decoding have a steeper learning curve and may need assistance knowing what’s in their hands.
• Designed for a slightly older audience: Designed for ages 10 and up means that some of the cards may be difficult for younger audiences to work with, especially ones like “straitjacket” that are misspelled as “straight jacket”. Students with street smarts and knowledge of multiple meanings may also have some interesting uses for terms – for example, “pot”.
• Specialized knowledge: Some of the cards contain terms that are (hopefully) outside the experience of many children, including ones that no child should know (“fox hole”) and ones that have some cultural variation in experience and exposure (“pinata”, “quicksand”).
• Narrow scope: In A Pickle engages logical-mathematical intelligence well, as well as visual-spatial intelligence well for students with good imaginations. However, without an visual point of reference or a kinesthetic element, students who have a hard time with auditory-only learning may need some reinforcement to enjoy the game.

Accommodations/Modifications:

• Visual representations of nouns: Using the rules of In A Pickle and cards with pictures from another game (including a couple already reviewed here), students who need visual representations of objects can participate (albeit on a more concrete and less figurative level).
• Therapist as arbiter: Sometimes, students have difficulty voting fairly. In those cases, using the therapist as a referee can be helpful or necessary.
• Support through drawing: For students who have difficulty conceptualizing “in”, using a SMART Board, tablet, or another game with a whiteboard or other drawing surface to sketch a picture of the comparison could be useful.

Alternate Uses:

• While the game focuses on “in”, the cards and game rules can be used for a wide variety of prepositions, expanding the game’s utility. Each student could even use a different preposition or concept during the game to keep the game varied.

In terms of game rules and setup, this game targets prepositions really well at a fundamental level. However, the cards themselves need some work in order to be effectively used with younger audiences.

Has anyone else had experience using this game in therapy? How useful has it been? What other uses and modifications have you used?

-John

Board Games and Speech Therapy: Reboot

It has been quite a while since I’ve posted about a board game, so to kick off the new school year (in Michigan, ours starts *after* Labor Day), I’m going to start with a review/preview post.

In this series, I’m covering a number of board games that I’ve used in my schools to keep students engaged in speech therapy. Some have relatively clear connections to the discipline, and others are less clearly connected. In each post, I discuss:

Variants/Expansions: If the game has a variant version (like a “Junior” or “Kids” version) or any expansions, these are listed here.
General Overview: A discussion of the game’s theme, mechanics, and play.
Skill Support: A list of speech and language skills (or related skills) the game can be used to support.
Strengths: Areas in which the game is effective in therapy with no changes to the rules or mechanics.
Challenges: Challenges that exist to using the game, with no changes to rules or mechanics, in therapy.
Accommodations/Modifications: Ways to modify the game rules and mechanics to make the game more conducive to speech therapy.
Alternate Uses: Ways to use the game’s components as speech therapy materials outside the game’s rules and mechanics entirely.

A list of games that have been review thus far (along with some updates since the initial post was made) follows:

1. Apples to Apples – I have gotten a copy of Apples to Apples Dice, and will be writing a separate post for it.

2. Rory’s Story Cubes – The next set, Voyages, isn’t out in the US yet, but the UK version has been released.

3. Backseat Drawing

4. Dixit – Dixit: Journey is now out, but it sadly lacks tiny wooden rabbits.

5. Get Bit! – If you don’t already own this game, a deluxe version of it is currently seeking funds on Kickstarter. It features colorful stickers (including pirates) for more fun and engagement with the younger kids.

6. The Storybook Game

7. Hedbanz

8. Uno

9. The Chain Game

10. Origins 2012 Round-Up

11. Telestrations

Games to be reviewed in the future include: Apples to Apples Dice Game (as mentioned above), In A Pickle, Once Upon A Time, Pictionary: The Card Game, Pictureka: The Card Game, Scattergories: The Card Game, Snake Oil, TellTale, Word on the Street, and many others. If there’s a particular game you’d like to see sooner rather than later (like, say, if you’ve got a materials budget burning a hole in your pocket), especially if you don’t see it on this list, let me know in a comment and I’ll see what I can do 😉

-John

Board Games and Speech Therapy: Telestrations

Today, I’m focusing on my favorite acquisition from last weekend’s Origins Game Fair – Telestrations by USAopoly.

Telestrations 12-Player Party Pack unboxed

Variants/Expansions: Telestrations currently comes in three versions. The basic game supports up to eight players, the Family Pack supports six players, and the Party Pack supports up to twelve players.

General Overview: Telestrations is a cleanly packaged implementation of an unpublished large-group party game called – depending on your social group – Telegram, Picture Telephone, or Eat Poop You Cat (I have no idea where some of these names come from). At the start of each round, each player gets a prompt card, a marker, and a markerboard sketchbook. Each player writes the word or words on the prompt card on the front page, turns to page 1, and has 90 seconds to draw that word or phrase. At the end of the time, the players flip to page 2 and pass the sketchbooks to the left. Then, each player looks at the picture on page 1 and writes a guess as to what it is on page 2. Once all players have written their guess, the players flip to page 3 and pass again, and must now draw on page 3 what is written on page 2. Continue until players have their own sketchbook back. At that point, the players review the contents of their sketchbook with the group, and hilarity ensues when seeing how what was written and drawn was interpreted (or, as is often the case, misinterpreted). The game doesn’t have a mandatory scoring system, but an optional “friendly” scoring system and “competitive” scoring system exist if desired.

Skill Support:

• Vocabulary – The players need to understand the vocabulary on the prompt cards and in the guesses to sketch the guesses.
• Approximation – The pictures drawn are often imperfect; the players need to be able to guess based on an approximation of an object or phrase.
• Written Language – Writing your guess is an essential part of the game – saying it out loud spoils the next player’s guess.
• Verbal Reasoning – Explaining how “wig” became “belly dance” at the end of the round requires expressive language skills.

Strengths:

• The Game Is Simple: This is a game that can be played out of the box with less than five minutes of setup and rules explanation. Modeling game play is easy.
• Engages Multiple Learning Modalities: Uses verbal and written language as well as “learning by doing”.
• Simultaneous Play: Because all the players play at the same time, you’re able to provide each student with a significant amount of engaging activity even in a larger group.
• Scoring Optional: As an inherently noncompetitive game, Telestrations allows you to teach skills without worrying about who “won”. As the game rulebook says, if you have fun, you win.
• Modification Suggestions: The rulebook is clearly written for people who like to make house rules and play with the mechanics of a game. Between two choices for scoring systems and three ways to “twist things up”, changing the game to fit the group is easy.

Challenges:

• “Telephone”: I mentioned in the Backseat Drawing post that one person can serve as a weak link. This is doubly true here; being seated next to the exceptionally poor artist can create a frustrating experience for an impatient player.
• Markers: In my experience, giving students markers is risky due to the possibility of tables, textbooks, iPads, and the like being marked up by students.
• Fine Motor Needed: This is not a game for your kids with severe fine motor difficulties (although my wife, who has mild spastic cerebral palsy, is able to play and loves it). In particular, the markers in the 8-player version of the game are somewhat thick, which can make it difficult to draw well.
• Literacy Dependent: The cards included with the game contain prompts that are designed for ages 12 and up. Students younger than this will likely have a hard time understanding the terms in the game (although the rules of the game acknowledge this and offer ideas).

Accommodations/Modifications:

• Alternate Prompts: If the prompts in the game are difficult for your students, your students don’t find them interesting, or they’ve seen them all, you can draw from other resources to provide additional prompts. While I regularly recommend games like Rory’s Story Cubes or The Storybook Game for this, you may want to stay away from prompts that have pictures on them, instead using vocabulary cards (like vocabulary terms from the curriculum) or cards from games that only contain words like Apples to Apples or The Chain Game.
• Colors: Adding colors to the drawing process, especially as the students are just learning, can add an extra level of directions or help the audience understand better what is being drawn. Colored dry erase markers are the easiest way to accomplish this.
• Clinician Participation: This game works best with an even number of players (because if there’s an odd number, you don’t draw your own prompt). To make the number of players even, the clinician can either participate or abstain as appropriate.

Alternate Uses: The best tool in Telestrations for alternate use is the sketchbook. As a multi-page markerboard, it works well for anything that requires students to either make a series of responses or a secret response that is passed to another player, whether it’s vocabulary practice, math lessons, or even providing a series of hand drawn or handwritten prompts in rapid succession. Other alternate uses can include writing practice (writing about one player’s reveal), and abstract reasoning (which of these prompts would be the easiest to draw and why?).

As a multisensory game with lots of possibilities for modification and accomodation that includes simultaneous play and recommended changes in the rulebook, Telestrations is one of the best treatment tools I’ve seen in a long time, and joins Apples to Apples and Rory’s Story Cubes on my “absolutely must have” list. In addition, it makes a fantastic party game to take home after the end of the work day.

Has anyone else had experience using this game in therapy? How useful has it been? What other uses and modifications have you used? Are there any board games you’d like to see discussed in this space in the future?

-John

Board Games and Speech Therapy: The Chain Game

This weekend, my wife and I will be attending the Origins Game Fair in Columbus, Ohio, and as I look for new games to play and blog about at the convention (if you know of one I should check out, let me know) I’m leaving readers with a review of a game that I found at the convention a few years ago: The Chain Game by Out of the Box Games. Also, this game, as well as some other games that are cycling out of print, are super-cheap at the Out of the Box website right now – go here and use the discount code DEALS.

The Chain Game by Out of the Box Publishing

Variants/Expansions: None.

General Overview: The Chain Game is a phrase-naming party game for 3-10 players. The first player starts by reading a two-word phrase or compound word, like “chalkboard” or “traffic light”. The next player must name a two-word phrase or compound word using one of the words in the previous phrase/word. For example, “chalkboard” can become “boardwalk”, “sidewalk chalk”, or “game board” (among others). A word combination may only be used once. When a player can’t think of something for more than five seconds, one of the other players honks the horn included in the game, and that player loses one of the plastic chain links they received at the start of the game. When a player runs out of links, the game is over and whoever has the most links left wins.

Skill Support:

• Literacy – This game features a significant amount of reading at the word level.
• Vocabulary Naming – The core mechanic of this game is thinking of vocabulary terms.
• Figurative Language – This game rewards players who are able to think out of the box (pun intended) and use idiomatic expressions. A player who can think of and use terms like “toss-up”  or “about face” are more likely to do well than players who can’t.

Strengths:

• The game is simple: Like other Out of the Box games, this game is easily played out of the box with less than five minutes of setup and rules explanation. Modeling game play is easy.
• The game is quick: At a manufacturer-recommended time of 20 minutes, this game can easily fit into a 30-minute group treatment session.
• The game works with vocabulary at an abstract level: There aren’t many games and activities that can quickly deal with vocabulary at an abstract level. That by itself makes this game worthwhile.

Challenges:

• Literacy is required, and at a relatively high level: All the cards have words, and the vocabulary is too complex for younger students. I wouldn’t use this game earlier than 5th grade.
• Narrow scope: The Chain Game doesn’t address many of Gardner’s multiple intelligences. It engages linguistic intelligence well, but that’s about it. Students who learn best through other methods – and not many speech and language students learn best using linguistic intelligence – may need some reinforcement to enjoy the game or find it effective.
• Negative scoring/Player elimination: Negative scoring, demonstrated by the removal of links, and player elimination can be demotivating for many students. The first time I used this game in therapy (during my clinical fellowship year), my 5th graders more or less universally rejected the game for no reason other than the negative scoring.
• Perseveration – I’ve had many games where the students just repeated two-word phrases starting with “red” for three times around the group before I told them they had to pick something else.

Accommodations/Modifications:

• Keep it concrete: By taking out many of the word combinations that are abstract – whether figurative or referring to a movie or book title – you can lower the entry age of the game a bit, but significant modeling is still going to be needed with younger students.
• Kinesthetic engagement: For students who aren’t visual learners, providing some form of kinesthetic reinforcement can get these students more interested in the game. This is going to require creativity on the part of the therapist, though, because substituting picture cards is going to be difficult (unless you have a really extensive set of cards that includes a wide variety of adjectives). My best suggestion on this end would be something like those flipbooks where you make crazy aliens or animals by mixing up parts, but that’s almost to the level of creating another activity.
• Collaborative input: This game really works well as a group activity if you take each group, read off a card, and give the groups five minutes to think of as many phrases as possible. Each group gets one point for each answer no other group thought of (similar to Boggle), and mixing the groups up throughout the session means that each student has an equal opportunity to excel (and provides a great opportunity to work on pragmatic and social skills).
• Positive scoring: By adding links for each correct answer instead of subtracting links for not thinking of an answer, this game can maintain positive reinforcement strategies and remove player elimination while still being a competitive game.

Alternate Uses: I haven’t really used this game outside its specific context. For anything else I’d want to use the game’s prompts for (storytelling, etc), I’ve had much better luck using materials from other games. The links could make good kinesthetic scoring tools in other games, but I’ve not had success with alternate uses otherwise.

This game is a good game for middle school students – it handles language on a more complex level, and there aren’t many games that do that without modifications. However, if you’re working with students that are younger than 6th grade or so, you may find this game to be a bit too much for them (although I’d welcome suggestions as to how to do so).

Has anyone else had experience using this game in therapy? How useful has it been? What other uses and modifications have you used?

-John