This paper plate craft is SUCH an easy way to target a variety of goals and skills in your speech room, including articulation, apraxia, and phonology disorder. It’s inexpensive, you probably already have a lot of the materials needed, and it’s a useful way to treat speech sound disorders. Plus, your students will love the gumball craft! To learn more about how to prep this craft (spoiler alert: it’s really easy!), keep reading.
How to Make the Paper Plate Gumball Craft
I love functional crafts that will achieve meaningful outcomes for my student’s progress on goals. And, I love crafts that are easy to prep! You don’t need much to make this gumball craft. Here are the supplies I used:
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- Paper plates (you need the flimsy white ones)
- Dot markers, stamps, or regular markers
- Red and black construction paper
Have your students decorate their paper plate with circles using the dot markers. Cut out a red shape for the base of the gumball machine. Then, cut out a top to glue on the paper plate. Draw a black hole for the gumball slot or cut out a piece of black paper and glue on the base.
Tips for How to Use the Paper Plate Gumball Craft with Speech Sound Disorders
Use the dot markers to keep your students engaged with their speech sound productions. Have your student decorate the paper plate with dots before creating the gumball craft. To make sure you get lots of repetitions in a session, you can have your students say their sound/word for every dot they make on the plate. Or, you can have your students drill five words/sounds per dot.
Sometimes, if my students struggle with waiting or if they take a long time to make dots, I will drill for 1-2 minutes and then let my students put 5-10 dots on the paper and repeat this until the paper plate is fully decorated.
Speech Sound Resources to Use with the Paper Plate Craft
If you are looking for articulation resources to use while getting those high trials, you can grab my articulation flipbooks. They include word lists, pictures, carrier phrases, and picture scenes for each sound. Use the L flipbook for FREE.
For your students working on speech words at the word and structured sentence level, use my visual sentence starters to help your students get that repetitive practice while creating this craft.
If you need another paper plate craft for working on grammar skills, check out these ideas in this blog post HERE.
Using Your Paper Plate Gumball Craft for Speech Sound Disorders
Once your student has decorated their plate, they can make their paper plate gumball craft. Don’t send the craft home with your student. Keep it for a couple of sessions as your warm-up. Have your student touch the dots on the gumball machine while practicing their sounds.
Or, flip the plate over and have your students write a list of their speech words that you want them to practice at home. You can use my Any Craft Companion Resource to have your friends glue some words to the back of the plate.
Send this craft home with your students for additional practice. You can direct your parents to put the craft on the front of the fridge. This will help remind both the parent and the student to practice the words on the back each day.
I hope that this post gave you a variety of low-prep and easy, yet effective, ideas for treating speech sound disorders on your caseload. My speech students have loved this fun gumball craft, and there are so many different things you can do with it! If you do this craft with any of the students on your caseload, I’d love to hear how you adapted it to fit their needs. Comment here on this blog post or email me at feliceclark@thedabblingspeechie.com.