Can it already be the 4th week of school? I’ve been busy trying to gather baseline data to start the year off right! When I think about collecting baseline data in preschool, I start with what materials to grab. This week I used my iPad, one book and my Jumbo Safari Counters from Learning Resources. You might think these manipulatives are just for math concepts but they have a ton of uses for SLP’s too!
The Jumbo Safari Counters come in a storage bucket and include 6 colors of giraffe, elephant, lion, gorilla, and rhino.
These were perfect for gathering baseline because I could use them in so many ways! Here’s the rundown of how I used them.
- Classification (we talked about which animals are safari animals and named other animals that were not)
- Plurals (receptive: Give me lions expressive: What do you see? I see three lions.)
-Vocabulary (most of my kids couldn’t name rhino!)
-Verbs (we did lots of playing with our animals! run, jump, hop, fall, eat)
-WH questions (Who has a long neck? Why do gorillas have long arms?)
-Body parts (One of my little guys has a goal for this! We found our eyes then the eyes of the animals.)
-Basic Concepts (temporal and spatial concepts. ie: Who is under the desk?)
-Pronouns (the inside of the animals are hollow – we used them as puppet to work on I/Me)
-Following Directions (both giving and following single and multistep directions of varying complexity)
-Comparative/Superlative (tall, taller, tallest)
The possibilities are endless with these animals! That list is just what I used them for in two days of baseline data collection! One other benefit I want to add is the size of the counters. If you’re working with children who have fine motor difficulties, the larger size will be helpful!
The Sarafari Jumbo Counters retail for $19.99 but Learning Resources wants to give away a set too! Enter using the rafflecopter gadget below.
