Today's post is coming to you from one of my best friends Megan Exner, M.A., CCC-SLP. Megan is an SLP with the Cleveland Clinic Pediatric Hospital. Megan and I both love to do therapy the same way. We like to take a single item and use if for multiple clients all day long. Megan has a caseload full of two year olds right now so she's sharing one of our favorite therapy tools!
One of my favorite activities to quickly grab for younger kids is this set of Color Discovery Boxes from Lakeshore Learning. Each box (yellow, blue, red, green) contains a ball, a crayon, a fruit, and an animal.
I like to do activities with these boxes that get the kids up and moving. It’s always a nice break from “table time”. I typically set up the boxes on the floor and dump all the items into a grab bag. The kid stands a few feet away from the boxes, picks an item from the bag, and tosses it into a box. Depending on the kid, they either aim for the matching color, or I let them mix it up and throw it in any color. Throwing things always makes the little guys more excited for therapy J. And lucky for us, all the items are soft!
I have used the boxes to work on the following language goals:
- Working on colors (that was probably obvious J)
- Structured sentences
- Preposition work (Throw then describe where the object landed (e.g. next to the yellow box, in the blue box, etc.)
- Where questions (e.g. Where did the pear go?, Where is the yellow crayon?)
- Categories: animals, foods
- Functions
- Matching object to picture (using Boardmaker pictures)
- Multi-step directions involving various concepts
I have also used them with an artic kids working on /b/ and final /n/ (I changed “box” to “bin” for the one).
You could easily add other items that you have around to the boxes, too.
The Color Discovery Boxes are typically $49.95, but I recently grabbed a set on sale for $29.95!
Thanks Megan!
