Dollar Store Dash!

Today, I am linking up with Teach Speech 365's Dollar Store Dash linky. The concept is to spend $5 and come up with 3-5 activities for the items you purchased. I totally failed on the spending limit (grand total of $21 dollars); however, I am going to talk about the items that have the broadest range of activities.

Superhero figurines and animals

Teacher Tree sight word dice & card games 

So the 5 items that I purchased for the linky are Dollar Tree's safari/jungle animals. I picked up the rhinoceros, lion, antelope, elephant, and giraffe. They didn't have the tiger at my store.  

Activities:

1) Safari animal vocabulary. I have several students with very low vocabularies this year. I love using figurines so they can have a 3-D image in their mind of what a lion looks like along with pictures from the internet or in video clips from National Geographic Kids. My students get to learn the names of the animals as well as actions that they do, like roar for lion.  

2) Following directions/positional concepts. I use stuffed animals to teach positional concepts; however, figurines work well for this task too. You can model moving the figurines around an empty tissue box or your students. Once they have grasped those concepts, it's time to work on directions by letting them move the animals around. 

3) Eliciting utterances. You can use these animals in pretend play to elicit utterances. I have several students working on 2-7 word utterances who are more comfortable talking in play activities. It makes them feel more comfortable and they open up in a way that you don't see in the classroom.
4) Routines. I have a few students that have to be coerced into joining groups. If holding the lion during book time gets them to sit with the rest of the group, I am perfectly happy to let that child have a figurine. The same for eliciting language/articulation. As long as it can motivate the child without becoming a distraction, why not?

So those are my $5 items. 

In other news, I finally wrote a goal bank for my middle school (6-8th) friends. It is for the language portion of the CCSS and is currently available to fans of my facebook page.