Favorite Toys for Eliciting Communication

As some of you may know, I am expecting my first baby (It's a BOY!) and will be taking some time off from work and blogging before and after his arrival. During that time, there will be several guest bloggers/SLPs that will be featured on my blog. I am so excited to share all of the amazing, informative posts they have come up with. I can not thank them all enough for taking the time to write these posts! Just another one of the many reasons I love being part of the SLP world. I hope you all enjoy reading everything over the next several weeks. Please feel free to leave comments and post questions.

 

The next guest post is written by Jenna at Speech Room News! Enjoy!

Preschool is my favorite area of speech-language pathology. I love to see the impact from early intervention! Today I wanted to share with a few of my 'go-to' therapy items for children who are very young or lower functioning. These items make great motivators and there are pieces so the child has plenty of opportunities to request. Amazon affiliate links are included for your convenience. 

My absolute 'go-to' for therapy are the Peek-A-Blocks. I love them and have rounded up quite a group of them. I grab them at Goodwill every chance I get. They make a set of alphabet, food and vehicle blocks. The items inside are all early vocabulary items (plane, duck, banana, etc.)

This little friend and I were working on expressing single words paired with signs (for animals and colors). Of course we built towers and crashed them down! Perfect for 1, 2, 3, go! If you hold the bag of items, you can have the students requesting for each block. The kids just don't get tired of building towers! 

One of my other favorite's is the Busy Gears set. Students add the gears to the base of the unit.

Once they add each gear, they press the red button and watch the toy light up and spin. This is highly motivating for my little guys, especially anyone with sensory issues. 

What are you using to work with the littlest ones on your caseload?

Jenna Rayburn, MA, CCC-SLP is a school based Speech Language Pathologist from Columbus, Ohio. Jenna writes at her Speech Room News. You can follow her on facebook, twitter, instragram and pinterest ((she loves social media)).