Sensory Bins: Adding the Unexpected

Sensory bins are all the rage with speech-language pathologists on social media, and I have enthusiastically jumped on the bandwagon. I've used them sporadically throughout my career, both in Early Intervention and with my private practice caseload with fantastic results, but after seeing so many amazing sensory bin creations on Instagram by my fellow SLPs, my interest in using sensory bins on a regular basis has soared to new heights!

My latest sensory bin creation is zoo themed, and didn't really require much creativity at all. Here's what I did:

1. I put pinto beans in a tub.
2. I added animals and props from various zoo toy sets.

That's it. Done.

Zoo in a whole new way!

But here's where it gets good: I added some things that are very unexpected, things that you wouldn't necessarily find in a zoo play set.

I added mini erasers of all different sorts! There are donuts, french fries, trucks, apples, pencils and more!

Why? Because it blasted language learning opportunities through the roof!

Children are naturally drawn to nonsensical things, like feeding donuts to elephants instead of hay, and giving a giraffe a pencil to use. They think it's hilarious! And it gives me the opportunity to target a wider variety of goals:

• Negation: elephants don't eat donuts, a robot is not a zoo animal, a giraffe can't hold a pencil
• Categories: this depends on the types of objects you use
• Silly Sentence Construction: The elephant ate the truck. The lion stomped on the donut.
• Absurdities: Do pencils swim? Do tigers play with rubber ducks?
• Sentence formulation: I like to choose an animal and an eraser and say, "Make up a sentence about a lion and a truck." This one is SO GOOD for my little friends who are so concrete and struggle to imagine silly scenarios. 
• Answering "why" questions: Why don't zookeepers take care of robots?
• Prediction: The zookeeper gave the elephant an ice cream cone. What do you think will happen next?
• Imagination!

Felice over at The Dabbling Speechie has wonderful ideas for creating and using sensory bins in treatment. She even has a tab on her homepage dedicated to sensory bins that lists her posts and offers materials to help you get started. Her printable list of categories from her "I Spy" sensory bin inspired me to make my own picture lists to accompany my zoo sensory bin.

These little lists have been so useful! So far, I've used them to target plurals, matching, final /s/ and /z/, copula verbs, vocabulary, and the pronoun "I".

They have also been helpful in helping direct the play of little ones who typically tend to only like to sift the beans through their hands, or scoop and pour. The mini erasers grab their attention, and they like to match them to the pictures.

Of course, you must used caution when adding any small object to a sensory bin. Especially if you have little ones who like to put things in their mouths as they could become a choking hazard. Be extra diligent!

So, how about you? Do you currently have a sensory bin that you're using? Try adding something that's a little unexpected. I think you'll love the results!

What's in My Cart: Teacher Appreciation Sale Linky

It's that time of year again, time for the Teachers Pay Teachers Teacher Appreciation Sale! Yay! I always find some awesome products to buy at a bargain price. I've linked up with Jenna at Speech Room News to show you what's in my cart this time around.

I'm definitely going to grab Brittany's Summer Print and Go Language Pack. I've got a couple of her other seasonal print and go packs and they are AWESOME! Very versatile and very little prep, and they cover a multitude of goals. Perfect for the end of the year and all summer long!

There are two great baseball-themed products I'm looking at...

Speechasaurus' Baseball Themed Language Activities, which targets describing, WH questions, vocabulary and categories...

...and Jessica's (The Speech Space) Baseball Mania! for targeting auditory and reading comprehension.  They both look so awesome, so maybe I'll get both!

Gold Country SLP's Summer Mystery Pictures is another item in my cart.  Kids love these! And this pack includes 6900 words! I think these will be great to send home as homework.

I was lucky enough to preview this one, and it is adorable!  Be sure to check this one out!  It targets pronouns, past tense verbs and adjectives. It would also be a great one to send home as homework!

My cart is getting full, but I can't check out without this one!  Super Power Speech's Social Language Informal Assessment is a must-have!

A product I'm loving right now is my Goin' to the Zoo  Early Language Pack.

It targets all sorts of early language skills including pronouns, plurals, WH questions, basic concepts, and possessives, and even has a set of cards and directions you can use with your Cariboo game.  I used this set for two whole weeks and my kids loved it! Be sure to check it out if you've got little ones on your caseload!

So that's a look at what's in my cart.  What's in yours?  Are you still looking?  Then head back over to Jenna's site and see what some of my friends have in their cart!

Zoo Part 2

  

Here's a couple more ideas that fit the zoo theme:

Monkeying Around Game

I've had this game for years, and it never fails to please kids of any age.  Kids take turns hanging monkeys by their tails onto the magnetically attached treetop that looms above an alligator-filled pond.  If the treetop becomes unbalanced, all the monkeys fall into the perilous pond with a grand crash!  I have used this game for all sorts of goals:  articulation practice, plurals, making predictions, and turn-taking, to name a few.

I think I bought mine at Super Duper, but I've seen it since at many toy stores.  It's just another great multi-purpose game that you can grab and adapt.

What's for Lunch Book

Here's a little book I made using Boardmaker for my preschoolers.  It's an interactive rhyming story about a zookeeper who has a wheelbarrow full of food to feed the animals.  The food pieces are attached to a separate story board (see the picture above), and placed into the bowl of the animal who requests it throughout the story.

 Here's a sample page:

And another:

You get the idea.  Just download it, print, add some velcro dots and you're good to go!  Here's a little time-saving tip:  Print the book pages on photo paper instead of card stock and you can eliminate the laminating step.  Easy.

I posted this book before knowing how to compile the Boardmaker files into one document, so unfortunately you'll have to download it page by page, until I can redo it.  Download the pages here:

Giraffe

Zookeeper Page

Cover

turtle

Seal

Monkey

Lunch

Food Pieces

Elephant

Nice chatting with you!

Pam

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

Good Night, Gorilla and Other Zany Zoo Ideas

Who doesn't love Good Night, Gorilla?! It's got to be one of my all-time FAVORITE books!  Each page is full of language-rich, engaging artwork that appeals to kids of every age and tells a delightful story using very few words.  It's the perfect book to use for building language skills at any level, making it the first book I'll go to now that we've started our zoo theme at Small Talk.

The colorful keys and cages in the book inspired me to make a little book to use with my preschoolers:

Each page of this 6-page book has an animal hiding behind a cage door that opens and closes, and a key that turns to "unlock" it.  How fun is that?

After opening all six doors and talking about the animals hiding inside their cages, we say "good night" to each one and lock them up again!  The preschoolers love to turn those keys, and the repetitive text makes it easy for them to "read" the story again and again.  You can download a copy to use with your kids here.  You'll need to print two copies of the cage doors, and one copy of the animal pages.  Cut the cage doors with room to spare for gluing on the left edge.  The keys are on a separate document; download them here.  I used a hole punch to make holes in the keys and on each page, roughly a half an inch from the right edge of the paper, and fastened the keys to the pages using brass fasteners.  Some of the kids helped with the assembly of their own books, which was an even better way to expand language.

Another activity I'd like to share is my Zoo Animal Box.  I bought a plain brown box from Michael's and decorated it with zoo animal stickers.  I filled the box with small plastic animals and made some question cards to go along with them.  The cards are pictured below, and ask questions about features.  The kids match the animals to a card that best describes them.  With some of my kids, we were able to group two or more animals with a similar feature, such as "pointy ears" or "sharp teeth", and talk about

which animal had "the most" spots, or "the longest" tail.  In some cases after the child was familiar with the animals and the question pattern, we reversed roles and the child asked me questions.  This was a great way to work on formulating questions and using descriptors.

I made a second set of card to use for comparatives and superlatives and a few blank cards for you to be creative with.  You can download both sets of cards here.  All in all, this was an easy activity to pull together and one that is easy to adapt to address a variety of skills.

I hope you enjoy these activities.  I'm sure I'll have more to add as The Small Talk Zoo just opened for business and I usually keep it around for awhile!  If you download any of my materials, please leave a comment to let me know how you plan to use them.

Nice chatting with you!

Pam