Our BHSM Trivia Contest was a HIT!

May was a busy, but fun month for the SLPs at my school!  We decided to have a lot of fun with BHSM this year!  (If you missed my post about some of the things we planned, you can read it HERE).

We got a great response from teachers and staff!  Many of the teachers and students stopped us in the hall to ask us questions.  We had about 20 people sign up for hearing screenings!  

But I think the biggest hit was our trivia contest!

It was surprising to see how competitive some of the teachers got!!!  We ended up asking 12 questions, many of which had "bonus answers."  We found that many of our initial questions were too easy (aka "Google-able").  So, we ended up adding the bonuses to make the questions more difficult.  Here are some examples:

• Name the three SLPs in the building.
• How many total students in the school receive speech and language therapy?
• What does a cochlear implant enhance? BONUS:  How many students in the school have a cochlear implant?
• SLPs often use the terms “Big Mack” (Voice output device) and “glottal fry” (raspy voice quality at lower registers).  These are NOT foods you would order at a restaurant.  Name the two SLPs who have family members who run local restaurants.  
• Name a famous person that stutters.  BONUS:  Which 2 SLPs have family members who stutter.
• 
  

Some of the teachers went above and beyond with their answers and I wanted to share a few of the responses with you...

"Name a disorder that is 'puzzling.'  Bonus:  Which two SLPs have a family member with this disorder?"

*This one should have been easy since our district does a fundraiser - "Piecing it together" (with a puzzle theme) for the ASD programs.

"Name three of the earliest developing speech sounds."

"Name a cartoon character with a speech disorder.  BONUS: Name the disorder."

I truly looked forward to grabbing the responses out of the answer box and checking them out!  By the way, many of you asked me to share the questions with you.  Did you end up doing a trivia contest for staff/students?  If so, how did it go?

BHSM Link Up!

Laura over at Oh, How Pintearesting started another fun link-up! Do you remember her March link-up? Well this one is similar and is a great way for us to celebrate BHSM!

Basically, you start with the image below. Notice the BHSM acrostic? Very clever of Laura! :)

And add your own responses (I used Pixlr). Here are my responses:

Buying: As you know, Teachers Pay Teachers just had its huge Teacher Appreciation Sale! One of the purchases I made that I'm most excited about is the Knuffle Bunny Speech & Language book companion by Jenn at Crazy Speech World. This has been one of my favorite books for a while, but I've (for no particular reason) stopped using it in therapy. I'm so excited to use it again thanks to this awesome resource! (Thanks Jenn!!!) (Knuffle Bunny Amazon Link)

Hearting: I'm totally hearting the weather! I love not needing to wear a coat. I love the sunshine. I love seeing flowers everywhere! What's not to love about springtime!?!

Sharing: If you missed it, my fellow speechies and myself are sharing all sorts of information with our co-workers during BHSM. You can read more info on that HERE.

Making: I just got some new clip art, so I'm making some new FREEBIES! Check back later this week for one of them. I'm hoping to have another ready for next week! I still have some more clip art ready to go, so if you have specific target requests, let me know!

Now it's your turn!

Here are the rules:

1) You are free to mention your own products, but if you do that, please put in items from someone else. The purpose is networking.
2) Give credit where credit is due - link to original ideas, blog posts, TpT/TN stores, Pinterest, etc.
3) After submitting your blog, visit four more blogs and make comments.

Don't forget to add your link to Laura's original post (HERE).

BHSM Goings-On

Unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably figured out that May is "Better Hearing and Speech Month"!!!  If you're a speechie, I hope you're participating in some way!  My fellow speechies (Stephanie & Donna) and I have decided to have some fun this year!

First, we created this informational bulletin board (sorry for the glare in the picture!).  It's located in the front office where both parents and staff can see it.  

In the center, you'll find the BHSM poster from ASHA.  There are also some handouts for parents and staff - a brochure on communication, the ASL Alphabet (we wanted to be sure to include a lot about hearing/ASL because my school houses the Deaf and Hard of Hearing program for our district.  ), a chart of speech sound acquisition from Speech, Listen, & Play, and a Handy Handout on fluency from Super Duper (#65).  The speech bubbles have the following quotes:

"The most important thing in communication 

is to hear what isn't being said." 

-Peter Drucker

"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." 

-Ludwig Wittgenstein

To kick off BHSM, on May 1st, we put this handout from ASHA and Progressus Therapy, and TheraSimplicity in the mailboxes of all the staff.  You can find this handout (along with some other BHSM ideas) HERE.

We actually lined up 5 handouts for staff information/education (one for each week in May).  There's another Handy Handout (#51) from Super Duper on fluency for teachers and parents, a handout on hearing conservation (2-sided, you can find one side HERE), and one on how speech and language skills affect academic success:

For week 2, we attached a handout on voice disorders to bottles of water.  One side has information on symptoms of voice disorders.  The other side has information on how to prevent voice disorders for teachers.

After hearing at least 4 or 5 teachers complaining about losing their hearing, we decided it would be fun to offer hearing screenings for staff as well!  Here's the sign-up sheet I created (you can download an editable version HERE).

Last, but probably most fun, we're hosting a trivia contest (with prizes!!) for the staff!  Since Donna splits her time between two schools, we decided to do the trivia questions only on the days she is at our school - Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.  So, we came up with 13 questions (there are 13 M, W, F days in May).  Some are easy (Name the three SLPs in the building), others are Google-able (Name the three bones in the middle ear), and some are more difficult (How many total students receive speech and language services in this school?).   On Wednesday, Donna introduced the kick-off to BHSM during our morning announcements and read the first question.  We were a little bit afraid that no one would participate, but we got a LOT of responses!  My favorite part of Wednesday was seeing teachers that don't know me very well - this is my first year at this school and I only work with preschool - walking by my door and copying my name from the sign on my door!  Stephanie and I even had a student stop us in the hall to ask what our names were!

Here's the form I made for teachers to submit their answers (you can download HERE).

We used a tissue box (what else?!?) covered in duct tape for teachers to return their answer forms.  (If you don't know about my love of tissue boxes, you can read more HERE).

I hope I'm not forgetting anything!  We've been having so much fun planning these activities and I really hope the teachers/staff get a kick out of them as well!

Oh, Donna gave us these from ASHA.  How cool are they?!?

I have to say that I feel blessed to be in such a terrific school with some truly awesome co-workers!  Stephanie and Donna are fabulous to work with!!  (I work with some pretty awesome teachers, counselors, OTs, & PT as well).  

Happy Better Hearing and Speech Month!!!

Are you doing anything fun to celebrate BHSM?  Also, if you're interested in seeing the questions we came up with for the trivia contest, let me know.  I don't want to post them here and give people an unfair advantage, lol!

Bloggers, link up your BHSM posts using InLinkz below.