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During the month of February, creating some fun Valentine’s day sensory bin activities can make your speech therapy sessions more engaging. When coming up with a new sensory bin idea, you can look for inspiration from the Valentine’s Day books you are using, skills your students are working on or the vocabulary in the theme.
Today, I am going to show you some different Valentine’s Day sensory bins that you can use with your students. Many ideas can be adapted for different goals, which helps with lesson planning for mixed groups. Using this as a Valentine’s Day speech therapy activity will surely support your themed unit.
Every sensory bin should have a filler item in the bin. The filler is using a tactile material that helps bring make the materials more engaging. You can read all about sensory bin ideas HERE.
Here are a list of some types of sensory bin fillers (Amazon Affiliate links included for your convenience):
Get help with making your own sensory bins with links to containers, fillers, and links to blog posts with different sensory bins you can make. Plus, you get free visual supports poster as well as free printables to make your own sensory bins, including a Valentine’s Day sensory bin!
Picture your caseload and what they may like to touch or what is best for their sensory system. For example, a lot of my younger mod-severe students cannot handle small plastic items because they would try to eat them. Or, they may try to dump out the bin, so I want easy to clean up fillers.
Sticking with affordable fillers that are easy to clean like shredded paper, foam pieces and pom pom balls would be a good choice for my students.
For friends that need the sensory input you may want to use rice or pasta. It’s all about what your friends can handle. I stick all of my sensory bin fillers in gallon sized plastic bags and rotate with one bin. That makes it easier to store.
When choosing what materials you want to put in your bin, think about all the task cards you have in your therapy rooms. Those can be put in your bin. If you need some Valentine’s Day verb cards, I have a free set for you.
You can put mini-trinkets in the plastic heart containers and work on all sorts of vocabulary, speech, grammar or wh -question goals.
Put story elements from the book you are reading in the sensory bin and work on story retell. What materials do you put in your Valentine’s Day sensory bins? Share in the comments!
One of the most versatile sensory bins I have made simply had shredded paper, pom poms and foam hearts in the bin. I added visual stimulus pictures from my Any Craft Companion resource to the foam hearts with paper clips and had students use a magnetic wand to collect all the hearts. Magnetic wands and chips are fave speech therapy material to use with sensory bins or other activities!
This went well with the book, “The Day it Rained Hearts” by Felicia Bond. Incorporating the magnetic wand made it extra engaging for students. You can switch out stimulus items on the foam hearts easily group after group.
If you love pairing themed sensory bins with your favorite seasonal themed books, we make it easier to plan engaging speech therapy lessons using activities from the Themed Therapy SLP membership. For the month of February, we provide book cheat sheets, companion activities, sensory bin printables and toy guides for friendship and Valentine’s Day. You will have speech therapy materials for the following books:
Amazon affiliate links included.
Have your students find the broken hearts that are in the sensory bin. Use these word association match-ups in your sensory bin from my Valentine’s Day language lesson plan guides. You can use the pictures to compare/contrast, use in grammatically correct sentences, answer wh – questions and describe by attributes.
Use the heart verb cards from my Valentine’s Day language lesson plan guides in a sensory bin. Have students pick the verb card and then use the sentence frames to discuss all the different ways you can use that verb. I also have “What is the person doing?” stimulus cards with visual answer choices. You can use them with my heart cutouts. Attach paperclips to the task cards. If the child gets a card that has a heart attached, they can keep it. Whoever has the most hearts wins.
We all know the color of love is red! So why not make a color red Valentine’s Day sensory bin to work on articulation and language goals. Other festive colors you could make are pink and purple, too. Use the printables from the color activities sensory bins for making red, pink, or purple color bins.
To make your red, pink or purple colored sensory bin you need the following:
Share your favorite bin fillers and materials to use with a sensory bin. You can also grab some FREE printables for your next Valentine’s Day sensory bin by downloading my ultimate sensory bin guide.
