This week at the outpatient clinic I work at over the summer, a little patient of mine came in with a shark puppet and a shark t-shirt and proceeded to tell me he just watched Jaws and it was now his favorite movie! Given his new found interest and it being shark-week, I thought we could make articulation therapy a bit more exciting by having mr. shark eat our target words. This particular patient loves to color so I quickly found some shark coloring pages, let him pick his favorite, and printed it out. While he colored in the shark, I cut up our articulation words from a worksheet I had pre-printed and then we got to practicing and “feeding” mr. shark. My patient absolutely loved it and was so proud to show his parents when we were done! By including his interests, I know he will be more likely to hang up the picture and be able to have more opportunities to practice the words at home! The last picture in this post is of my patient who I see directly after my shark loving patient. He saw how cool the picture came out and he wanted to make one took. It worked out perfectly because he was practicing the ‘sh’ sound and the ‘l’ sound so there were lots of opportunities to practice ‘sh’ with “shark” and “sharp” (teeth).
P.S. I love the difference in coloring skills. The light blue paper is actually a 2nd grader, and the dark blue paper is a first grader! You can tell who enjoys coloring (and sharks) more!
