Epic Beach Sensory Bin For Speech Therapy

Epic Beach Sensory Bin For Speech Therapy

Making a beach sensory bin as an extension activity for your beach-themed books can be a great way to cover a lot of speech and language goals and keep your students engaged.

Typically, when I plan my sessions, I find books that fit the theme I want to teach and then plan some extension activities that include vocabulary and concepts about the theme.

Today, I will show you how you can make an epic beach sensory bin and save time hunting around for all the items. Amazon affiliate links are included for your convenience in the blog post. I get a small commission on items purchased at no additional cost to you. 

Sensory Bin Filler Ideas

 

When it comes to your sensory bin filler, you can add elements representing ocean water and a sandy shore. Kinetic sand can work great for the shore, and there are a variety of options for your ocean as listed below:

Blue Pom Pom balls

Blue plastic rocks

Blue shredded paper 

Cut up blue straws

Blue water beads

Blue glass beads

Blue dyed dry rice, pasta, or chickpeas

I used kinetic sand, blue plastic rocks, and shredded blue paper for my sensory bin.

Materials to Add to Your Sensory Bin

It can sometimes be hard to find mini figurines and elements related to your sensory bin, but I found some CUTE beach-themed items in a most unlikely place, cake toppers!

You can use these beach cake toppers to have umbrellas, recliners, palm trees, shells, and more! You can get mini buckets, shells, and mini paper umbrellas at Michael’s to add to your bin. Here is another beach cake topper set in case you want to compare which one has the elements you need for your bin.

I used the ocean animal TOOBS that I have, or here is another set that would work well for ocean animals. 

Use this epic beach sensory bin to cover speech and language goals

Beach Books to Pair with This Sensory Bin

Here are some beach-themed books that would pair nicely with your sensory bin:

Beach Day by Karen Roosa

Curious George Goes to the Beach by H.A. Rey

Just Grandma and Me by Mercer Mayer

When a Dragon Moves In by Jody Moore

Sun, Sun by Brad Gray

Do you use one of these books in therapy? Or, have a recommendation for a book to use with a beach theme? Let me know your recs in nteh comments of this blow post. 

Therapy Ideas for Using Your Beach Sensory Bin

In therapy, you can target noun functions with the beach items, verb actions, answering wh-questions, basic concepts, and social-pragmatic language. The easiest way to keep things streamlined with your mixed groups is to have a list of words by your students’ target sound. Having the word list makes it easier to remember what you can target with all the students in your group.

For example, you can say, “Who swam up to shore?” to work on ‘who’ questions. But, you can also work on /s-blends/ and /sh/ with that question. How would you use this beach sensory bin with your students? Let me know in the comments! Would love more ideas. 

Need more Summer-Themed Sensory Bin Ideas

If you are on the hunt for more summer-themed sensory bins, check out how you can make an ocean sensory bin. You can also check out how to make a “Can You Find It?” sensory bin with different seasonal vocabulary including summer! To make mixed groups easier, you can grab the summer-themed sensory bin companion that comes with printables and cheat sheets to help you target all the speech and language goals in your group. If you make this sensory bin, I would love to see it! Tag me on Instagram @thedabblingspeechie

Easy Summer Crafts For Speech Therapy

Easy Summer Crafts For Speech Therapy

You either love or hate crafts as an SLP. While I am not a fan of messy crafts that involve glitter and expensive craft supplies, I am down to do crafts that help my students stay engaged. And, if you can use the craft as a functional therapy tool, it’s a go for me! Try these easy summer crafts for your speech therapy sessions when you need to find engaging activities that pair well with a summer-themed book.

The summer crafts in this blog post require minimal supplies that you can afford or hopefully find in your school supply room.

Craft Supplies You Need for Summer Crafts

Here are the things you will need (Amazon affiliate links included for your convenience):

 

Some of the crafts featured in this blog post are from the summer crafts for the speech therapy set.

Beach-Themed Crafts for Speech Therapy

If you are doing a beach theme, make a kid buried in the sand craft! You will have one craft template and can print targets for your speech or language goals. Every student does one craft in your therapy sessions but has targets for practicing their goals.

Easy planning for you and keeps students engaged! And they can take it home for home practice.

Ocean-Animal Crafts for Speech Therapy

There are LOTS of fun low prep ocean animal crafts that you can pair with your favorite books. This craft is fun because you can glue targets on the inside of the craft and then use it to work on basic concepts and with your pretend play activities. For more ocean-themed craft ideas and books to pair with them, check out this blog post

Easy summer crafts to use in your speech therapy sessions to cover goals and ideas for how to use as therapy props!

Summer Crafts That Pair Well With The Summer Season

Easy summer speech therapy crafts that will keep your students engaged in the session!

Making a sun with a paper plate or just with construction paper is perfect for summer because it’s hot outside! You can have students glue or write words on the sun rays or on the back of the paper plate.  If you are working on summer weather concepts, you can write activities you can do when it is hot outside. Or, write down things that are hot and cold!

For more ideas for how to use this sun craft, check out the REEL on Instagram.

You can also make a lemonade craft or easy tissue paper or paint crafts for a summer 4th of July BBQ. Check out the pictures below. The lemonade craft is part of the summer crafts for speech therapy resources. And, the watermelon and fireworks low prep crafts are from the summer push-in lesson plan guides

S’mores Craft For Speech Therapy

LOTS of kids are eating s’mores over the summer whether they are camping or having backyard firepit hangouts. This is an easy craft to do and pairs well with a camping theme! Need this template? It’s part of the summer craft set

Books to Pair With These Summer Crafts for Speech Therapy

Beach Day by Karen Roosa has fantastic pictures! After reading this book, I had my students create a beach theme, and then they got to sprinkle natural sand on their craft with Elmer’s glue. You can read about it HERE!!

A Camping Spree With Mr. Magee by Chris Van Dusen is a great little story about camping. You can read about some of my camping-themed therapy ideas that I did last year.

When a Dragon Moves In by Jodi Moore is a fabulous beach-themed book! You could create a sandcastle or dragon craft with this book!

Alex and The Amazing Lemonade Stand by Liz & Jay Scott look like a fun read! I just ordered it. It would go perfectly with my Ice Cold Lemonade Craftivity.

Easy summer crafts for speech therapy that you can use with mixed groups and your favorite summer books!

What Summer Crafts Do You Love to Use With Your Summer Themed Activities?

What crafts do you love to use for the summer season? If you have one that is easy to prep and engages your students, share it in the comments! As always, tag me on social media @thedabblingspeechie if you use one of these crafts so I can see what you are up to in your speech therapy room. 

The BEST Summer YouTube Videos for Speech Therapy

The BEST Summer YouTube Videos for Speech Therapy

Whether you are seeing your students in person, providing teletherapy, or doing a little bit of both, these are the best summer-themed youtube videos for your summer therapy plans. 

When exploring summer fun, you can find reading passages about summer, weather concepts, going to the beach, ocean animals, and outdoor activities. Themed reading passages are a great way to work on tiered vocabulary, listening and reading comprehension, story grammar, sequencing, identifying the main idea, and recalling important details. Varying your supports and finding passages with your student’s speech sound are a plus! This will help you plan a great mixed group lesson for your students. 

As always, www.readworks.org or www.getepic.com are great places to find books and passages for your summer theme. Summer videos are great companions to those passages or an alternative lesson plan to the reading passages all together. 

You can use summer videos to help organize your therapy sessions with engaging content. In this blog post, I will be sharing some of my favorite summer videos for teletherapy.

Summer YouTube Videos for Teletherapy

You can kick-off your summer-themed lessons with this fun video about the sun and the seasons from Crash Course Kids. This video uses an engaging poem to help build background knowledge about seasons. With this video are 5 additional videos which you can break up over the course of an entire month to target vocabulary and language. These videos are great for a 20-30 minute session since they aren’t too lengthy.

This Scishow kids video is great for learning about the importance of sunscreen!

All the BEST Summer YouTube Videos for teletherapy so that you can stay organized with planning your sessions.

Practice Social Skills Using Summer Videos

 

These Simon’s cat summer videos are a fun way to target those nonverbal social skills with your students. I like to use these videos when we’re practicing facial expressions and body language. My student and I talk about how the animals are feeling in the videos. 

If you want to see how you can use Simon’s Cat videos to target a variety of goals, check out this BLOG POST.

I also like to use the animated videos when practicing inferences with my students. These are fun summer themed videos to practice this skill.

Summer Videos Using YouTube Book Read Aloud Videos

All the BEST Summer YouTube Videos for teletherapy so that you can stay organized with planning your sessions.

Shared story book readings are a great home activity to support your students’ generalization of language concepts. Even though reading the actual book is preferred, sometimes my families don’t have access to a variety of themed books. Especially now with many libraries still closed. YouTube read alouds are a perfect alternative for students. They will still have access to the story, keep learning about summer, and increase their language building opportunities at home. 

To make sure that it’s still a shared story reading, encourage families to keep the YouTube video on mute so that they can read the pages. I try to find book read alouds that show clear pages so that families can read the lines from the story. 

This is a great home carryover activity, but it can also be a great therapy lesson. Pause the read aloud and talk about what your student sees on the page. I also like to ask my students what they think will come next or how this story goes along with our summer theme. 

Other ways to use books are by screen sharing while projecting a book from Kindle Unlimited, Vooks, or using Epic. If you’re looking for some more summer books ideas, check out my list of books for targeting summer vocabulary.

Get Up And Moving With Your Students

It’s summer and the perfect time to go outside and get moving! Use these fun, summer-themed songs to have a movement break with your students during your sessions. These songs are great to use for your whole group lessons as a warm-up or when you can see your kids are struggling to pay attention. 

Use these songs and videos to target seasons, summer vocabulary, and basic concepts in a way that’s fun and engaging for your students. I like to also have my younger students work on requesting and imitation with these movement breaks. 

Don’t forget to check out the Frozen song video (who doesn’t love Olaf?). Share in the comments what songs you like to use with your students. 

If  you want all these summer songs in one place as well as more of my faves, grab this free summer YouTube Google Slides by clicking the pink button.

Use Google Slides to Organize Your Summer Videos

All the BEST Summer YouTube Videos for teletherapy so that you can stay organized with planning your sessions.

One way you can keep all your favorite videos organized is by adding them to a Google Slide or PowerPoint. I find that adding them to Google Slides is easier for sharing with educators or families. Once you add in all the video links, you can easily navigate to the ones you need for the lesson.

Once you have it organized, you can use it year after year with your groups. If you need all of these videos in an organized Google Slides presentation, grab my summer-themed language lesson plan guides that have a Google Slides™ presentation included. It comes with everything ready to go.

You can see how you can organize your videos and activities in the video below.

What summer videos have you found and included in your summer lessons? I would love to add them to my collection of materials! Share in the comments.

Summer Speech Therapy Activities: TPT Round UP

Summer Speech Therapy Activities: TPT Round UP

Summer is just around the corner and it is a great theme to use in therapy!  Having summer speech therapy activities to send home as homework are perfect for those summer months.  If you are working this summer, then grab some summer speech therapy activities on TPT!!

summer speech therapy activities for SLPs, special education teachers and ESL teachers. Great for summer themes or summer school lessons.

I started using my summer themed resources this week and plan to use them till the end of May.  Check out my round up of free and paid TPT products that I have found to help plan therapy.  I have links categorized by target area, so you can easily find the items you need!

Summer Speech Therapy Activities

Planning speech therapy lessons is a whole a lot easier when you pick a theme! If I want to do a BBQ theme, then I try to find resources that will cover goals for my whole caseload. These summer speech therapy activities are listed by target area, so you can quickly find items in the areas you need for your summer theme.

Articulation

Grillin’ Up Articulation: SH, CH, DJ

Grillin’ Up Articulation: S-blends & L-blends

Firework Artic FREEBIE K,G,F

Cool Minimal Pairs: s-blends

My Sound Castles for Articulation: ALL Sounds NO prep

Summer Themed BUNDLE No Prep Artic L,S,R,SH,TH,V

Flip Flop Articulation Matching Game

Let’s Go Camping: An Articulation Unit

Flip Flop Articulation Dot Art NO prep ALL sounds

Oceans of Words-Awesome Articulation Worksheets

Summer Color, Cut & Glue Articulation Activities for Early Developing Sounds

Summer Color, Cut & Glue Articulation Activities-Later Developing Sounds

Mystery Pictures for Speech & Language Summer 6,900 words

Mini Speech Club Summer

Syllable Squeeze Multisyllabic Words for Speech Therapy

Interactive Smore Articulation Activity: Hands on speech therapy

Beach Hunt Interactive Articulation Sensory Tub Activity

Summer Later Developing Sounds: Articulation Games

Summer Early Developing Sounds: Articulation Games

Open Ended Games

Gone Camping FREEBIE Open Ended Board Game

FREEBIE No Print Pass the Prize Summer Edition

Summer Open Ended Games

Ready for Summer 3 games in 1

Lemonade Maker: Open Ended Reinforcemnt Game

All Around the Campground Game Board Set FREEBIE

Summer Open Ended Gameboards FREEBIE

Grammar

Pronoun Fun with Rangers Rick & Susie FREEBIE

Speech Therapy Pronouns/Prepositions for Summer Grades Prek-1st

FREEBIE summer pronouns he, she, they, him, her, his, hers

Grammar Golf Grades K-8th

Summer People Sentences: 3rd Person Pronouns FREEBIE

Summer Complex Sentence Builder

Beach Grammar Activities for Speech Therapy Classrooms

Language

Summer Time Grammar & Vocabulary Pack Grades Prek-2nd

Scoop Up A Delicious Story FREEBIE

Out In The Woods Cause & Effect Grades 1-5

Camping Out Categories Grades Prek-1st

Splash With Language Levels 1, 2, 3

BBQ Figurative Language

Summer Themed Preschool Speech & Language Pack

Summer Descriptive Sentence Fram FREEBIE

Fishy Guessing Similarities & Differences 2nd-5th

Summer Vocabulary Activities Grades Prek-K

Sailing Through Summer Speech Grades Prek-5th

That’s Fishy! Which Does Not Belong: Understanding Negatives & Associations FREEBIE Prek-1st

Summer speech FREEBIE: Gardening

Get Your Hamburger On-Visuals & Printables for Writing Intervention Grades 2nd-5th

Summer Vocabulary BINGO Grades Prek-2nd

Under the Sea Language Activities for Speech Therapy Grades K-7th

Summer Figurative Language Grades 3-8

Ice Cream Emotions- Feelings & Pragmatic Vocabulary Grades 4-8

Write-Say The Room Summer

Sweet Summer Speech & Language

Fun In The Sun: Beach Themed Speech & Language Activities

Summer Interactive Books

All Around the Campground Game Board Set

Buzzin’ True or False FREEBIE Grades 1st-4th

Summer Fun Language Grades 1st-6th

Speech Camp- Expressive Language Activities

No Print Splashing Into Language: Expressive & Receptive

Picnic Time Language

What Goes With Interactive No Print Categorization Associations

Camping Categories

Spring & Summer Stylist: Expressive/Receptive Language Activities Grades Prek-2nd

Say What? A Comprehension Activity Summer Edition Grades Prek-1st

Summer Print & Go Language Pack

Under The Sea: A Thematic Unit Grades Prek-K

Nonfiction Texts with English Language Arts Targets Spring/Summer Edition Grades K-5th

Baseball Themed Language Activities K-6th

Sunny Packet of Language Fun

Greetings From Summer Camp: Listening for Details

Flip Floppin’ Into Summer Interactive No Print

Fun in the Sun Language Activities

Camping with Questions Yes/No Wh-questions for Speech Therapy

Ocean Animals Facts: Receptive/Expressive Language Activities K-6th

Speech & Language BUNDLES

Soaking Up Summer With Speech & Language No Prep Summer Pack Grades K-4th

Two Scoops of Speech & Language: An Ice Cream Themed Activity Packet

Hear it, See it, Say it: Fun in the Sun Seek & Find

Hear it, See it, Say it: Let’s Go Camping

Ladybug Printable Speech & Language Activities FREEBIE

Summer Fun Pack for Speech & Language Therapy or classroom fun

Speech Therapy Oceans of Fun Bundle

Book Companions

The Rainbow Fish Speech & Language Companion Grades K-5th

The Rainbow Fish Phonemic Awareness Pack

Phonemic Awareness Activity for The Rainbow Fish FREEBIE

Lisa the Lifeguard- Interactive Story & Comprehension Activities

Over in the Meadow: A Book Companion

Story Companion- The Big Wide Mouthed Frog

Giraffes Can’t Dance Speech Therapy Book Companion

There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Shell: A Book Companion for Language

There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Shell Language Unit

Smiley Speech Therapy Book Companion

There was an old lady who swallowed a shell: Speech & Language Activities

Craftivities

S’mores, Beach and Lemonade Crafts for Mixed Groups

Summer Craftivity Worksheets

Father’s Day Speech, Language & Articulation Themed Unit with crafts

Craftivity Vocabulary Activities Summer Theme

Sensory Bin Companions

Summer Sensory Bin Companion for Articulation & Language

 Extension Activities for Home Practice

Summer Homework Packet for Speech & Language Therapy Grades Prek-5

Summer Worksheets HW Pack for Speech Therapy

Preschool Speech & Language Summer Homework Packet

Common Core Summer Packets for Speech & Language Grades k-5th

Summer Articulation Homework Packet

Summer Language Homework Packet

Summer Homework Calendars for Speech, Articulation, Language & Fluency

FREE Summer Speech Homework Calendars for Articulation

Print & Go Summer Camp Speech & Language Homework

FREE Summer Speech Homework Calendards for Language

A Summer of Speech & Language Calendars

Speech & Language HW for the Summer

Summer Preschool Speech & Language Packet: Learning Through Play

PUSH-IN Language Resources

Summer Themed Push-In Language Lesson Plan Guides K-2

Camping Themed Push-In Language Lesson Plan Guides K-2

Beach Themed Push-In Language Lesson Plan Guides K-2

Ice Cream Push-In Language Lesson Plan Guides K-2

Behavior Management

Splish Splash Summer Themed Behavior Management Set

Do you have summer speech therapy activities that you love to use with your students? Leave a comment below or email me at feliceclark@thedabblingspeechie.com, so I can add them to my stash!

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