When you are looking for new speech therapy materials to use with your mixed groups, you want resources that will increase engagement, cover a LOT of goals, and are easy to adapt across ages and activities. Mini trinkets can help you plan engaging lessons that are effective for younger and older students. Nothing makes the school day drag on when you have back-to-back sessions where the kids think your lessons are boring. You can intentionally work on speech and language goals using mini trinkets and it does not feel like work to your students. Today, I am going to share how you can use mini trinkets in speech therapy to keep things motivating and productive in therapy!
Where to Find Mini Trinkets for Speech Therapy?
If you love the idea of using mini trinkets in speech therapy but not sure where to find sets for specific goals, here are some sets that I love:
Speech and Smile has an articulation set that has all the sounds and comes in a very portable container!
Need mini trinkets for I Spy activities? Check out Dinky Doodads set.
For mini trinkets to use with themes, check out this mini trinket set with lots of themes or get specific themed sets like this pets unit.
You can also find figurines from TOOBS on Amazon .
Ways to Use Mini Trinkets With Your Favorite Speech Therapy Toys
Use Mr. Potato Head, little people, stuffed animals, or the students in your group to work on pronouns with dinky doodads! For more ideas on how to use the toy, Mrs. Potato Head, check out this blog post.
You can have your students feed the mini trinkets to your toy figurines, practice basic concepts and work on wh-questions.
Let your students pick out 5-10 mini trinkets that they want to use with the toy or stuffed animal. For example, if you used the Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head, your students can put the items in front of the potato heads. Then, your students can talk about “who” has the egg, donut, or corn? You can work on the correct pronoun marker or noun-verb agreement while creating sentences about what the Mr. or Mrs. Potato Head each has.
Use Plastic Eggs or Surprise Toys With Mini Trinkets
If you have plastic eggs from the Easter season, save them to use all year long! Or, you can use these surprise party boxes (affiliate link included) to put the mini trinkets inside. Go on an egg hunt and stick trinkets inside the plastic eggs. After the kids find the eggs, they can sort the items by categories using my FREE category visuals. Plus, you can work on the basic concepts in/out with a sentence frame “The _____ is in the egg.” If you need more ideas for working on categories and struggling with where to start in therapy, I have a great blog post with lots of tips you can see HERE.
Make A Mini Trinket Speech Therapy Sensory Bin
Make an “I Spy” sensory bin! There are a lot of different ways to use this sensory bin. One way is to make an articulation station activity. Seriously, this is probably my most used sensory bin and was the easiest to make once my dinky doodad order arrived!
You can also use this “I Spy” sensory bin to work on category groups and noun-function. Or you can use the sensory bin as an articulation station.
While you are working with other students in the group, have your students look for trinkets with their sounds. Then, they can practice using the trinket in a carrier phrase. Need these articulation mats? Click the pink button below for your FREE set.
Visual Supports When Working on Articulation Sentence Productions
If you are needing visual support to work on speech sounds at the carrier phrase level, check out these visual sentence strips. They have pre-made sound-loaded carrier phrases so you can create silly sentences with mini trinkets. There is also a No Print version included with these sentence strips.
How to Make a Buried Treasure Sensory Bin with Mini Trinkets
My second favorite sensory bin to use is my treasure hunt bin. I use kinetic sand and hide the dinky doodads in the sand. Check out this post to read more.
How Do You Use Mini Trinkets in Speech Therapy?
I would love to know how you are using mini trinkets in speech! You know I am all about adding therapy ideas to my speech toolbox, so share in the comments or email me at feliceclark@thedabblingspeechie.com with ways you are using these in therapy.