Once I brought in my tap lights, they were such a hit with my students!! I have so many students with different needs, I wanted to find a way to use them with all groups!
One way I decided to use them was for discriminating between minimal pairs. I took two tap lights and placed them on my table. I put minimal pair pictures behind them. I said one of them and the student had to light up with word I said. Once they had mastered discriminating with my speech, they got to discriminate their speech. I took out my handy dandy recorder and recorded them saying each word. Then I played it back for them and the student had to light up with word they heard. It definitely helped made minimal pairs fun and exciting.
Here are some minimal pair pictures to use for common articulation errors:
Another idea was to teach past, present, and future verb tenses. First, I introduced the concept by making a chart on my dry erase board. As a group, we came up with words and phrases that tells us whether it is happening in the past, present or future. Some words we came up with included: yesterday, now, today, last month, my next birthday, tomorrow, etc.
To review, the students picked a card out of my brown lunch bag. Either I read it to them or they read it depending on their reading levels. In order to get their “point” they had to tap on the appropriate light based on the sentence. They knew to look back at the board to recall some key words to help them! We had so much fun learning verb tenses with our tap lights!
