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Do you need a St. Patrick’s Day sensory bin speech therapy activity that will cover many goals and be adaptable for ages? You can use this easy-to-make lucky green sensory bin for younger and older students. Don’t you love it when you have materials that can be used across many ages? Not only will this sensory bin work great as color green activities for your preschool students, it will also help you cover LOTS of speech and language goals. And, using one activity to cover mixed groups during March when lots of IEPs and paperwork are due, this will help you lesson plan quickly! I started using festive St. Patrick’s Day sensory bins many years ago, and it has been a staple speech therapy material that I can use for 2-4 weeks with most of my caseload.
All you need is a bin, some shredded green paper and green items from around your speech room. You can use many different containers for your St. Patrick’s sensory bin.
For my St. Patrick’s Day sensory bin, I used the following items (Amazon Affiliate links are included for your convenience. I get a small commission when you use these links):
If you need ideas for green items, I grabbed vegetables and fruit from my play food, cars, insects, green cups, green markers, and crayons, play money, green toy clothing items or items from your Alphabet Sounds Tubs from Lakeshore Learning. I would love to know what green items you have found so I can grab materials to add in my future lucky green sensory bins. You can also head to the Dollar Tree and find green items.
Teaching the adjective for the color green is easier with this sensory bin companion. You can work on articulation, phonology, adjectives, verbs, nouns, receptive and expressive language goals without stressing! In the speech therapy sensory bin printable resource, you will have speech sound word lists, visual supports, green item printables, parent newsletter and sentence strips. Check it out HERE.
One activity that I love to play to work on noun-functions is my Can You Find It? Game. I put items in the bin and then give clues to my students. Can you find something that you eat? Or, Can you find something that you wear?
Because I don’t have a TON of real items, I made a lucky St. Patrick’s Day sensory bin activity using different green items. It includes visual supports, and visual sentence frames to work on describing the items. IYou won’t regret having a sensory bin companion that will last you the whole month of March (lesson plans are finished, so you can focus on therapy without the stress.)
See the pictures below to check out some of the items and visuals included in this resource.
For articulation and phonology goals, your students use this St. Patrick’s Day sensory bin to hunt for green colored items with their speech sound. Use the speech sound word list in the color green activities sensory bin companion to reference words by sound.
Have your students hide an item in the green grass after they produce their target sound 5 times. You can print the green items as a full-page and lay at the bottom of the bin. Cover with grass or black beans for dirt and have students push the filler to reveal the green item.
Then, your students can identify if the word has their target sound. If it does, then students can roll a die to see how many times to practice the word.
Give your students a sound-loaded phrase to use while creating sentences with the green objects.
Listed below are some examples of sound-loaded phrases:
What sound-loaded phrases can you come up with for this bin? Share in the comments.
For articulation carryover, have your students create a silly story using the items in the green bin. This can work well with your language students too. You can have them work on story retelling and oral narration.
Your students working on expressive grammar and syntax goals, use the green objects to target morphology, such as marking the nouns with a plural tense marker. Furthermore, you can use the item to build more complex sentences. In this blog post, I share a free part of speech graphic organizer to pair with the items.
Add in items that are NOT green to work on categorizing items by the color green. Also, you can work on yes/no questions and practice negation, such as “The apple is not green.” To target conjunctions, students can explain items by color attributes. For example, “The bush is green, but the flower is purple.” or “The broccoli and lettuce are green.”
This green sensory bin has so many opportunities for building vocabulary. Have your students describe the items in the bin by attributes. Or, have them look for items in specific category groups. Work on answering wh- questions while using the items.
Are you looking for more St. Patrick’s Day themed ideas? Head to this blog post and your lesson planning will be a breeze!!
If you want to use more March-themed sensory bins, head to this blog post for other ideas. By heading to this blog post, you can also plan some spring sensory bins.
Download my FREE ultimate sensory bin guide (click the pink button above to grab it) and make a fun baby chick sensory bin during spring. If you head to this blog post, you can make a chicken-inferencing sensory bin activity (it’s a free download on that post.)
Do you have a fun way to use with your students on your speech therapy caseload? Share your therapy idea in the comment!
I am always looking for sensory bin inspiration, and I am sure other SLPs are too. You can share your sensory bins on Instagram using the #slpsensorybin hashtag. If you want new ideas, I recommend following that hashtag to get sensory bin updates in your feed.
