How do you create your visual schedules? Homework sheets? Bingo cards? Ever have that moment where you want to make a visual schedule in the SPED room only to realize you left the CD in your speech room? Yeah… me too. 

Now…there are two new ways to create a lot of great materials. First, there’s Custom Boards by smarty-ears which is in and of itself completely fabulous. It has many many templates available and tons of pictures. Just like Boardmaker (BM), Custom Boards has some excellent qualities and wonderful uses and is for use on the iPad which makes it unique (and even more wonderful)!

However, last night, I had the pleasure of having an individual tutorial on a new(er) method as well… and that is this site: LessonPix.com

What I learned last night impressed me enough that I bought a membership…of course, it wasn’t hard since it’s a mere $2/month ($24/year) and for those of you working with a district, the owners Bill and Lori will work out bulk pricing so it’s definitely worth checking out even if you already have the lovely BM CD or the even lovelier CB.

Let me show you what I mean…

First off – say you are searching for word lists for a particular client. My client, Susie, has a really hard time saying SK in the medial position…How many words are there with SK in the medial position, I wonder… Hmmm.

I can go to LessonPix.com (and even without a membership) look up the Sound finder. I type in a word with SK in the middle of a word…in this case… “Basket.” The IPA transcription comes up with small boxes for check marks under each letter. I choose the SK (after all that’s the sound she has trouble with). I notice it has “find selected sounds at the beginning, middle, end, or anywhere” choice…so I click on middle. Click find words and all off a sudden my screen is filled with the 25 top matching words (and pictures) with SK in the middle of the word. Here’s a video tutorial on “Sound Finder.”

Now all I have to do is drag and drop into my tray and I can make any number of activities…

For this purpose, I’m going to choose… basket, biscuit, asking, whiskers, iceskate, mosquito, and hopscotch.

We are going to spend the entire session working on these words. Now, of course, in order to not be totally boring, I need to change up a bit what we’re going to do…so.. (and this is the part where I totally went ‘ooooh’!”

On my “tray” (which really looks like a small green chalkboard) are my pictures. I also have the option to “create materials” or “load, clear, save,” and the ever necessary trash can. I’m going to click on “Create Materials.”

When I do this, it gives me a drop down menu with a  TON and I do mean a TON of options. Everything from dominos and Bingo cards to Picture Schedules…First/Then Choice boards to Coloring Sheets…Proxtalker cards to Playing cards. Totally amazing and all within the click of a mouse.

For Susie, I’m going to use these words and pictures to play a Uno type game, Dominoes, and Bingo. To make the Uno type cards all I have to do is click on “playing cards.” I get the choice of how many times I want to use the same picture, (we’ll pick 1 this time around), click next, then I get the choice of what color do I want? Well, for something similar to Uno I want all the colors. So, Red, Blue, Yellow, and Green are clicked. Show image title/Yes is clicked…and then…wait for it… “finish.” I download the PDF and that’s it…I now have a deck of child specific cards to print out, laminate, and cut…In less time than it took to write this post – I have created a fun game specifically targeting the skills needed for this student.

I click back a few times and I can make the Bingo cards using the same words and pictures! What’s even better…is I can tell the site how many times to use the words, how big of a layout I want (3×3, 4×4, 5×5), AND… how many boards I want. If Susie is coming to speech with a few friends – I can create 2, 3, even 5 boards all with the same pictures in different order (like a true Bingo game). With the click of a single button!

Now…I’m not going to show you everything Lesson Pix can do. First, there’s simple not enough time. Second, you’d take one look at this giant post and click out of it anyway…(now wouldn’t you?)… The best thing you can do is go look around the site. Check out the video tutorials.

Here’s a brief rundown on what you can do using LessonPix.

• Visual Schedules (many styles)
• Calendars
• Homework sheets
• Activity boards
• Board games
• Picture Books
• Early Literacy activities
• Upload your own photos (easily!) and only you have access to them
• Request specific pictures to be created
• Use their “restricted” area for those hard-to-find-but-oh-so-necessary pictures when working with older students/clients and needing to have “those” conversations with them.
• Look for new activity ideas here...

But…don’t take my word for it. Go check out the site. Tell them Mary sent you…You won’t regret it. Trust me.

When you’ve checked it out (you can trial it for free here!) …please, take a moment to come back here and tell me what you liked the most. I’ll definitely give the feedback back to Bill and Lori…and who knows…maybe one of them will even respond.

Until then…Adventure on!

Mary