Spring Preschool Vocabulary: Insects

With Spring’s arrival, Winter activities are put away and the next file cabinet is opened in my speech therapy room. I try to keep up with the themes of our prekindergarten and kindergarten teams. If possible, I pre-teach the vocabulary that I know they will be discussing in the upcoming weeks. The first set of vocabulary I focused on this year was bugs and insects. This was partly because of the upcoming unit and mostly because I have a huge number of boys in preschool speech therapy this year who are crazy about all things bugs and dinosaurs.

My boys loved the Dinosaur Sensory Bin last Spring, so I created this Insect Sensory Bin and data collection forms to accompany all of our activities this season.

Some of the books we read the first week were: (Amazon Affiliate Links)

The Hungry Caterpillar, The Grouchy Ladybug, and The Very Busy Spider.

Using the characters from this sensory bin, I was able to animate the stories as I read them aloud. For instance, I used the fly piece when reading aloud The Very Busy Spider. I flew him around the page and asked questions to work on positional terms: “Where is the fly?” I placed it in all positions around the animals and then finally on the web when the spider caught it. I also targeted receptive language skills by asking the students to put him behind the horse, under the cow, etc.

When reading The Grouchy Ladybug, I was able to similarly target goals using the ladybug piece. There is even a beetle and a bee in that book as well. My students loved incorporating their sensory bin pieces into the story. They would get especially excited when they spotted a bug from their bin in the stories.

I used a few types of things in the sensory bins depending on the students I was working with:

-Potting Soil

-Shredded Brown Paper (Dirt)

-Shredded Green Paper (Grass)

-Pinto Beans

-Elevated sand box

I would love to see your Bug Sensory Bins in action. Feel free to email me pictures to share on social media or tag me in your posts. To see more of my sensory bins in action, follow along on instagram. Please leave comments below related to how this activity was used in your therapy room or classroom.

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