I absolutely love using themes in therapy. I run my therapy sessions by themes. They help keep me organized and focused on therapy activities. I also feel like themes give my students extra exposure to similar vocabulary. As a traveling SLP, themes help me limit the amount of materials I carry around. I use the same theme and books with all of my kids, I just adults the related activities I use based on their goals. I just wrapped up my dinosaur theme and I think this may have been my favorite theme so far! Here is what I did!
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All of my therapy sessions are built around books. I use a book in 99% of my therapy sessions. There are so many goals you can reach just but using a book. (You can check out a post I did on that
here.) I typically read a new book every week with my students. Some books can be stretched out for 2 weeks. These are the books we have been using:
Another thing I love to include while using themes is a sensory bin. With this sensory bin I used black beans and
plastic dinosaurs. Thankfully I found a lots of dinosaurs in my kids' playroom, but Amazon has a ton available! This is a fun way to let the kids pretend play- which is a great language opportunity. We also discussed the differences in the dinosaurs, worked on prepositions, and sorted them by color and size.
A few years ago I happened to find a
dinosaur popper at Walgreens. My kids love shooting the ball at target words (articulation, vocabulary, sight words, etc). I get a ton of practice out of them when the popper comes out!
We also lined the cards up to make a path, for the dinosaur. Then we had the dinosaurs go on a "Dino Walk." The kids practiced their words as the plastic dinosaur walked down the path!
If you know me, you know I love using PlayDoh in therapy! Especially with articulation. These
Dinosaur Dash articulation mats from
Texas Speech Mom were a total hit! We even used the dinosaurs to smash the ball of PlayDoh as they practiced their words!
I keep all of my themes organized in a clear storage box. This keeps everything organized by theme and all of my related materials together. When it's time for a new theme, I simply take out a new box and put it in my trunk! I use a
20qt clear bin that I found at Target. It is big enough to hold all of my themed materials but doesn't take up too much room in my car.
