Transcript

One of the activities that I like to do as part of my oral language program is called Mystery Bag. And what I do is I ask my special student of the day to bring in a mystery object that they hide in the bag and they write clues about at home. What I really encourage is that parents help the students stretch out the sounds and that the students are writing the clues on their own at home. They're very excited to share these clues with their friends when they come in the next day. An example of clues might be something like, "it is soft, I sleep with it, it begins with the letter T". 

One of the neat activities we do as an extension to this is we have question sticks. And the question sticks come in this cute, little smiley faced cup, and on the sticks we've written question starters, why, what, how, is, who, and where. Throughout the year we like to add more and more question starters, and actually the students are very eager to share some of the question starters that they'd like to see in the jar. What the special student does is they'll pick three friends to come up and pick a question stick. Once a friend picks a question stick, they read the word that's on the stick and then have to ask a question starting with that word. For example, if I picked the stick where, I would ask something like "where did you get it? Where do you keep it at home?" That allows the extra special student to talk more about the object that they've selected and why it's important to them. If those three students have not guessed, then the special student can pull out their object out of the bag and share with us. Mine was a teddy bear today. Sometimes the students will guess and they're very excited to be able to figure out what is in the mystery bag.