My wonderful principal ordered a new and unique toy for our campus...
Amazon has a GREAT price on it right now (affiliate link):
Lucky for me, it made it's debut in The Speech Room!
The Pea Pod comes in three sizes. We have the small 48" size and two kindergartners fit in it well. I actually got three preK kids in it at one time! (let's just say we worked on some social skills that group as well)...
"The Canoe" is for kids who need that little extra snuggle. The Abilitations website calls it "the perfect refuge" for kids, especially those with sensory needs. It was interesting to see how each kid reacted to it. Of course they all wanted to get in!
Some kids got deep down inside it, others sat on the edge. Most kids rocked it side to side, some more violently than others! The important thing is, they all loved it and didn't want to get out of it. It had me wishing there was one in my size.
Now, how did I incorporate a canoe into my speech/language lesson for the day? With adding a little literacy to language!
We read One-Dog Canoe by Mary Casanova. It is a wonderful repetitive story that is so easy to sequence and retell. The kids took turns getting in the canoe and retelling the story as I sat at the "helm" and flipped the pages, pointing to key parts of the story. It is a story about a girl and her dog who embark on a canoe trip and encounter many new animal friends who want to get on board. They keep telling these animals "no" but they keep hopping on until.....well I won't ruin the ending for you!
The book has so many vocabulary words that my kids were unfamiliar with. We talked about of course...canoe, life jacket, paddle, beaver, fern, loon, dew, wolf, bear, moose, and frog. There is all kinds of beautiful descriptive and non literal language in the book like where it describes the river's waters as "ribbons of blue". It's just a wonderful book all around. I will be adding it to my classroom library.
Here is a picture of our "canoe" at the end of a very eventful day!
