My Favorite Dollar Spot Therapy Tools...

There's only one reason that every SLP who works with children makes frequent trips to Target (well, other than scouting out those end-aisle clearance displays with Starbucks in hand, that is)...  The Dollar Spot!  Loaded with inexpensive seasonal goodness, the dollar spot is ripe with toys and activities just waiting to be turned into therapeutic tools to make our sessions fun for the little ones.  Here are some of my recent favorites...

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​#1

• This adorable stacking wooden fruit toy is a great way to encourage practice of target skills during articulation therapy (let's say the word "stack" each time we stack fruit!")...not to mention encouraging vocabulary ("what fruit is this?"), categorizing ("it's not a vegetable, it's a fruit!"), describing skills ("this lemon is long like an oval, is yellow, and is sour."), and following directions and basic concepts ("stack a red fruit on an orange one", "first stack the strawberry, then the grapes")

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​#2

• I adore this little dog puzzle I picked up for $3.  We love using him for multisyllabic words (one syllable per puzzle piece).  But, it could also be used for expanding utterances to include target syntactic forms, such as those pesky auxiliary verbs ("The girl is singing".. using one word per block).  

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​#3

• If you have a ton of articulation or language cards (like any good SLP) these place card holders are so fun!  It's probably hard to make out from the 2nd photo, but bean bag tossing is our game of choice for these little, gilded animals.  This is great for mass practice of target syllable shapes, for activities using the cycles approach for those kids with phonological impairments, or matching language cards (e.g., pronouns, verbs, etc.) with the animals for language expansion ("The lion is running!", "She is a giraffe!"). These are also great as placeholders on board games.  The possibilities are endless with these little guys!

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​These are just a few of my more recent favorites. If you'd like to see videos of how I use these and more, head over to my Instagram and follow me. Until then... see you at Target! I can't wait to see what Spring themed items I can snag this week.