What's on your SLP Wishlist?

The recent Linguisystems sale sparked a small bustle of debate on therapy materials. I love how many people responded with helpful suggestions and feedback on how products have worked for them. It got me to thinking about my favorite materials and current wishlist items. I thought I would share just of few of them with you today. 

Speech Room Favorites: 

Teddy Talker is a product by Creative Speech Products that's designed to promote articulation and print skills. The foundation kit includes the Teddy with his articulators, tongue puppet, learning letters, manual, and tote bag. There is an additional alphabet poster that combines all of the images from the mouth position cards. I consider this kit to be a "speech essentials" and use it nearly every day with my younger students. They LOVE imitating Teddy's mouth in my mirror while making the target sound. Teddy also introduces them to new vocabulary words and concepts too using picture cards or other manipulative objects.

 My next favorite tool is my marker collection. I use my Sharpies to create many of my DIY projects that I post on here. You can use them to write on just about anything: shower curtains, die-cuts, plastic, etc....I also like to use them to create templates for my students to color. I can scan these images via our copier and have them saved to my files for years to come. 

My dry erase markers also play a huge role in my therapy sessions. I let my students keep track of their data with me and they get to practice writing their answers to my questions. It is amazing to see how much they love using the markers even when I know that they hate writing.

I recently purchased a used set of Super Duper's Ring Talkers from a second-hand bookstore. This item has been on my wishlist for the past two years after having such positive experiences with their Wh- Bingo game. The cards are easy to carry around and can be used in several different ways. My favorite way to use them is to have my students formulate complete sentences to either answer or ask a question.    

The Giant Book of Phonology has been a great lifesaver over the past two years. It kept me sane when I was trying to learn how to use the Cycles Approach versus the Articulation Approach that I grew accustomed to in graduate school. I use this book at least twice a week. I also like that you can print out copies of the pictures to create cards. (It's another one of my laminating projects.) 

Speech Room Wishlist:

1. The Expanding Expression Tool
2. Story Grammar Marker  
3. Pick Your Points- Language 
4. Flamingo Bingo & Lotto 
5. SPARC for Concepts (really I would love to have the whole series of these lol)

Recently, I gave up and bought some of them items on my longer wishlist (ie...Super Duper's 75% clearance sale). It makes me really happy to see that Super Duper has returned to offering more savings on their products. There are times when I'd much rather use one of their products than try to figure out how to make something remotely decent to use. However, I still find it odd that teachers have to invest so much of their own money into classroom materials. It seems like providing students with sufficient learning materials should be considered something important by state governments. Ah, life......