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.
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:
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!
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.
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
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):
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.
Summer Crafts That Pair Well With The Summer Season
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!!
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.
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 orwww.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!
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 thisBLOG 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
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 fromKindle Unlimited,Vooks, or usingEpic. 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.
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.
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!!
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.
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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