Pirate Treasure Sensory Bin for Speech Therapy
What kid wouldn’t want to hunt a pirate treasure sensory bin for mystery jewels and trinkets?
A pirate theme is ONE of those themes that NEED a sensory bin to pair with your books and themed props.
You can use many lovely fillers and materials to make a pirate treasure sensory bin. I will show you all the options today in this blog post!
Sensory Bin Fillers You Can Use
You can fill up the entire sensory bin with kinetic sand, or you can do a mixture of sand and water elements. For my bin, I took fillers I already had from my beach bin that you can see how to make HERE. Amazon affiliate links are provided for your convenience.
Here are some ideas for water:
- Blue shredded paper
- Blue plastic rocks
- Blue pom pom balls
- Blue kinetic sand (this could get mixed)
Pirate Materials for Your Bin
You definitely can use pirate props from toys and games you already own. But, if you don’t have any in your speech therapy stash, check out this blog post for a round-up of pirate sets you can use in your bin.
I have toys from the iPlay pirate toy set and this dramatic play set in the bin pictured.
Here is a list of other pirate-themed props you can purchase to add to your bin:
Pirate ship prop (4 inches in length)
Mini Golden Pirate Treasure Chest
Mini trinkets – Dinkydoodads, SpeechTreeCo, PlumTreeProducts
When in doubt, use what you already have or head to Dollar Tree during St. Patrick’s Day holiday and get some of those golden coins. Save them for a pirate sensory bin. See more about the gold sensory bin in this blog post.
Need Pirate-Themed Materials for your Prek-5th Grade Caseload?
If you love doing a theme-based approach with your elementary caseload, but don’t have the TIME or the energy to come up with engaging activities, join the Themed Therapy SLP membership. We have monthly themed units ready to go that you can adapt across your caseload’s ages and goals. Sign up today!
How to Use Your Pirate Sensory Bin for Play-Based Speech Therapy
Your students will LOVE working on their goals while they play with this bin. For targeting CORE words, you can model “look, more, mine, yes, no, here, there, find, and open.”
Easily target verbs while playing, such as dig, hunt, look, find, bury, hide, open, discover, and steal.
For your speech sound disorder goals, pick a target word or sound-loaded carrier phrase to use throughout the activity, such as “Show me the ______.” or “Yo ho go.” If you bury sound-specific mini trinkets, you will get LOTS of target practice. Read more about mini trinkets HERE.
Teach basic concepts, answering wh-questions, story retell, and syntax/morphology are some of the other goals you can target with this bin.
More Ways to Use This Pirate Treasure Sensory Bin
Whenever you make a themed sensory bin, you gotta pair it with a themed book! After you read the book, you can reinforce vocabulary and concepts from the story in an engaging way for your students.
If you have some fun pirate dress-up props, you can assign a student to be the ship’s captain! The captain can give orders on where to dig and look for treasure.
Your students can also take turns hiding treasure in the kinetic sand. While one student is hiding the treasures, the other student is doing a quick drill for a minute. Then, each student can switch roles.
Review tier II vocabulary words and then use the sensory bin to demonstrate the words in action such as with the words discover, bury, bounty, anchor, crew, escape or greedy.
What Would You Put in Your Pirate Treasure Sensory Bin?
Do you have a favorite pirate-theme material or filler you love to use in your sensory bins? Let me know what you would put in your sensory bin in the comments. Better yet, tell me how you would target speech and language goals using this bin too!
