Teaching from My Trunk... and the best dollar I've spent all year!

Welcome to Teaching from My Trunk! 

This is a blog all about efficient strategies for teachers of the Deaf/hard of hearing. Many of us are itinerant teachers, traveling between campuses, and therefore, we have to keep many of our materials in our cars. It is critical that we are efficient with the materials that we choose so that... 

1) our trunks and cars don't look like a hot mess all the time. This makes my neat-freak husband happy... but it it also helps me have more calm in my mind!

2) our backs will thank us! When I carry too much stuff, my bag starts accumulating more and more and my back and shoulder starts to get a little upset. Being more efficient means less unnecessary materials.

3) we can waste less time searching for a game or activity to meet the need of one skill for one student. If we have materials that are versatile, hopefully we can spend less time digging through our trunks and have more time for teaching... and paperwork? :)

My first versatile tool is...

JUMPING FROGS!

Just to be clear... I put those frogs in the pond by hand... #cheater

I know I am not the first therapist or teacher to discover the joys of jumping frogs... However, I have been amazed by how much my students have loved adding to our sessions. I came across it at the Dollar Tree, and I was SO excited. I use it in a couple of ways:

I will use it as a way to earn iPad time for a reward. Every time they get a question/task correct, they get to jump a frog (I've been giving them two tries because I'm a softie). At the end of our task, however many frogs they got in the pond tells how many minutes (or how many half-minutes depending on the length of our session) they get on the iPad. They can choose to watch a video/story or play one of our games (my iPad options are very limited!). This is especially great for the more "boring" data collection days!

When students are working on a target skill that involves choices, I can put a different color frog on the pictures for each choice. If they make the right choice, they get to take the frog and try to jump it in the pond!

Sometimes, the frog themselves can be a reward! If they complete a task, they get x amount of frogs to jump. My littlest friends are especially motivated by the frogs themselves. 

Do you have any other ideas for versatile games/tools that can be used as motivation for tasks during a session? 

Now... enjoy some images where I was trying to get the frog in the pond, but I gave up. :)

Until next time...