30 Jul Toy Tuesday: Bubbles
Our final Toy Tuesday comes from Gail, who shares her ideas for using one of our favourite activities – bubbles!
Everyone enjoys playing with bubbles and they’re great for motivation and building rapport in speech and language therapy sessions. However, they can also be used as a therapy tool in their own right.
Developing interaction skills:
- Watching for anticipation of more bubbles and waiting for eye contact before you blow more
- Taking turns – “my turn”, “your turn” to blow and to pop the bubbles. This is great practice for turn taking in conversation.
- Asking for help to remove the lid
- Encouraging the child to request “more” or “again”
- Practicing pointing in order to pop the bubbles or to choose which pot of bubbles to blow from
- Developing joint attention – the adults models “look” when the bubble has burst and see if the child looks back at you
Expressive language skills:
- Use of single words: bubbles, pop, more, again, gone, blow.
- Combining words: “more bubbles”, “bubbles gone”, “big/little bubble”
- Modelling and eliciting phrases such as “Ready…steady…go”
- Using different sizes or colours of bubble bottle so the child needs to describe them to request.
- Labelling different body parts or items in the therapy room when the bubble lands on them.
- Teaching signs for open, more or finished.
Receptive language skills:
- Giving directions on how to pop the bubbles (clap them, jump on them), either one at a time or in a sequence (first clap then jump)
- Describing where the bubbles are and what they’re doing – “the bubbles are going up/down” “there’s a bubble in front of/behind you”
Speech sounds:
- Speech sound targets including /b/ for ‘bubbles’, /p/ for ‘pop’, /m/ for ‘more’
- Any speech sound or target word could be practiced as a bubble is popped.
We hope you’ve enjoyed our Toy Tuesday series! Keep up to date with all our therapy ideas, news and training on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest.
