Speech and language therapists are often known for their arrival at a school, carrying an unwieldy bag full of assessments and resources. With this magical bag, they are armed with the tools to assess and provide intervention for a wide range of children. How do they do this?
The skill of choosing games and activities which are fun, engaging, but have the versatility to be used for a number of speech and language functions is a fine-tuned art! For many therapists, this involves years of borrowing their children’s toys, ogling toy shop windows and some nifty charity shop purchases, resulting in a kit that would rival Mr Tumble’s spotty bag.
So, today we share our top tips on the best toys and games for working on SLCN in schools.
Before we launch into toy and game suggestions, our years of experience have taught us a few golden rules, when compiling your kit:
Our Three Golden Rules:
- Make it lightweight
Some schools are in the great position of having an intervention room where speech and language groups can take place. Others may have to deliver intervention in different places around the school, depending on the space available. A top tip from us is to have a ‘grab and go’ therapy box, full of versatile speech and language activities. This way, you can minimise disruption as you grab it from the cupboard and head off to your intervention.
- Consider longevity
Balloons are a fantastically engaging activity, but we blow them up with our mouths…and they pop. It is worth considering which motivators will not require maintenance or replenishment: a spinning top can be equally fun!
- Make it versatile
There are many games and activities that can cover a wide range of language activities. You may have printable resources that are more bespoke for that child and can then map them on to these games. This works really well alongside the supplementary teaching plans in our Infant and Junior Language Link packages, or the speech sound programmes in Speech Link.
Our Six Top Toys:
- Puzzles
Puzzles have multiple parts. You can hide picture resources under each piece, and the child earns the pieces to make the puzzle. You don’t even need a real puzzle—just print out a picture that the child might like and cut it into pieces!
- Pop up games (E.g. Pop-Up Pirate or Pop-Up Dragon)
With this activity, a child can ‘earn’ swords or flags when combined with sound or language picture cards. In addition, they can be great for conditionals, sequence words, negatives, positions, concepts, listening and following instructions. For example, “Give me a sword that is not blue”, “Put the red sword at the top” and “If there is a blue sword, take a red sword”.
- Pocket money motivators
Popping cows, spin-copters, bubbles and pop eyes are all exciting, lightweight toys that ‘break the ice’ at the start of a session or act as a reward.
- Grabbalo or Compare Bears
These small plastic toys, containing different objects of varying size or colour are great for category work, conditionals, vocabulary, sequences, linguistic concepts and position words. You can make an ordered traffic jam with the cars, selecting all the objects that are animals, or discuss similarities and differences, for example.
- Lotto game
The staple lotto game covers a multitude of language targets. Lotto can support engage children in vocabulary learning, negatives and thinking about categories and attributes, as well as support attention and turn-taking skills, particularly in a group.
- Story cubes
These picture dice can help with narrative and sequence but are also highly effective when working on verb tenses, co-ordinating conjunctions and supporting children to develop verbal reasoning skills.
—
Have you joined our Facebook Group, ‘Speech and Language Support for Schools,’ yet? There, we will be sharing specific activity ideas that complement the games above. Come and take a look!