Play Dough Mats and Other Fun Stuff from Pinterest

Are you as addicted to Pinterest as I am???  I just can't get enough!

I thought I'd share a couple of ideas I found there that I used this past week.

The first one came from a pin by Karen at prekinders.com She posted this darling book of play dough mats that I just had to download.  Here is the one I used this week:

I used it with my articulation kids, and my little ones who are building their vocabularies.  After they said a target word correctly, I gave them one play dough "berry", which they promptly squished on the pie.  They loved it!  One little boy was NOT into pie, so I made him a dump truck.

Aren't these fun?  If you want, you can down load them here and here.  Just print and laminate and you're good to go.

Pinterest is also where I found all these wonderful blogs that have inspired me to become more creative.  Jenna Rayburn over at Speech Room News is a prolific Pinterest pinner with endless creative ideas.  She posted a way for us to make all those wonderful photo collections posted by Heidi Kay at PediaStaff on Pinterest easily accessible with your iPad by using an app called Tapikeo HD.  You can check this app out at the App Store.  Basically it enables you to turn photos into audiobooks, flashcards and communication boards.  Jenna does a fabulous job giving us a step-by-step tutorial on how to use it; check it out here.  I bought the app and quickly realized the possibilities are endless!  Another pin caught my eye:  From Head to Toe Game (by Eric Carle) posted by starfishtherapies.wordpress.com.  A reader of this blog described how she made this activity into a "movie", and I decided to borrow her idea, but use the Tapikeo HD app instead.  Here's what I did:

I took screen shots of the animals in the book From Head to Toes by Eric Carle.  I imported them into a Tapikeo grid, and added my own text and recorded myself reading the text.  I left every other cell blank so I could import photos of a child later.  During our treatment session, I took photos of the child performing the actions as we read the book and imported them right into grid.

We edited the pictures by adding his voice.  The text in the book says "I can do it!" after each action, but he was working on the /r/ sound, so he said, "That's really easy!" instead.  After eight actions were photographed and recorded, we were ready to play back our story.  Here's what it looked like:

Voila! An interactive story completed in about 20 minutes.  He was so proud!  Another fun thing about this app is that you can export your stories to other devices if they have Tapikeo too, so you could share it for home use.  As I said before, the possibilities are endless!

Happy Pinning!

Pam