Are you planning a spider speech therapy unit and need some hands-on ideas for your sessions? Check out these two easy spider speech therapy sensory bins to use with your elementary speech therapy caseload.
If you plan it right, you can find many spider elements at Dollar Tree or Walmart during the Halloween season for a steal of a deal!
Fillers and Materials for Your Spider Sensory Bin
Here is a list of items you need to make your bin (Amazon affiliate links are provided for your convenience):
- Painter’s tape
- Various sized spiders
- Purple glitter spiders are from Dollar Tree, and the smaller spiders you can get on Amazon.
- The fake webs can be found at Dollar Tree or Amazon.
- You can add insects into the bin to talk about what the spider caught. There are a variety of mini insect sets on Amazon.
- Hand scoopers were from an insect kit from Dollar Tree, but you can also find scoopers on Amazon.
Themed Therapy SLP Membership has a Spider Unit
Do you love themed therapy but don’t have the energy or time to plan all the activities for your Prek-5th grade caseload? You can now enjoy your themed therapy while letting someone else take lesson planning off your plate. The Themed Therapy SLP membership provides the following:
- Book cheat sheets.
- Hands-on activities.
- Google Slides.
- No Print activities.
- Task Cards.
- Open-ended activities.
- Reading passages for your elementary caseload.
Sign up for the annual and access over 24 themed units at once, including this spider theme! This spider unit is part of the October themes.
Spider Speech Therapy Sensory Bin – What Did the Spider Catch?
With this first spider speech therapy sensory bin, you can add the webs as your filler. You can throw in some mini insects and play “What did the spider catch in their web?”
If you have mini objects, you can also throw those in the bin. Your students can hunt for mini objects that the spider caught that have their target sound!
With this activity, you can work on the following goals:
- “What” questions
- Discuss the process for how spiders catch their prey, focusing on the vocabulary spin, prey, catch, wrap, suck, cover, strand, poke, fangs, venom, inject
- Describe the insects or items by attributes
- Target sentence structures and MLU such as “I found ____” or “The spider caught _______.”
You can see this bin in action on Instagram.
Spider Speech Therapy Sensory Bin to Teach Vocabulary
I spotted this balance spider web sensory bin from Happy Toddler Playtime and knew there are a lot of ways to use this sensory bin in your speech therapy sessions.
First, you put painter’s tape across the top of the bin. Then, have your students try putting spiders on the tape to balance the web strand.
To make this sensory bin more versatile, find different-sized spiders or types of spiders to use with the activity. By having different sizes, you can target big and little.
With your older students, you can demonstrate the tier II vocabulary of balance, tumble, carefully, sticky, and any other vocabulary you can think of to use with this spider activity!
Your students can earn spiders after each speech sound production and then see how many spiders they can place on the web before one topples off the web.
How Could You Use These Spider Sensory Bins With Your Student?
What other speech and language goals can you target with these spider sensory bins? One of the BEST ways to learn how to adapt materials is to ask SLPs to give ideas. If you can expand one of these sensory bins for specific goals, share your thoughts in the comments.
