Toy Tuesday: Bubbles

Our final Toy Tuesday comes from Gail, who shares her ideas for using one of our favourite activities – bubbles!

Everyone enjoys playing with bubbles and they’re great for motivation and building rapport in speech and language therapy sessions.  However, they can also be used as a therapy tool in their own right.

Developing interaction skills:

• Watching for anticipation of more bubbles and waiting for eye contact before you blow more

• Taking turns – “my turn”, “your turn” to blow and to pop the bubbles. This is great practice for turn taking in conversation.

• Asking for help to remove the lid

• Encouraging the child to request “more” or “again”

• Practicing pointing in order to pop the bubbles or to choose which pot of bubbles to blow from

• Developing joint attention – the adults models “look” when the bubble has burst and see if the child looks back at you

Expressive language skills:

• Use of single words: bubbles, pop, more, again, gone, blow.

• Combining words: “more bubbles”, “bubbles gone”, “big/little bubble”

• Modelling and eliciting phrases such as “Ready…steady…go”

• Using different sizes or colours of bubble bottle so the child needs to describe them to request.

• Labelling different body parts or items in the therapy room when the bubble lands on them.

• Teaching signs for open, more or finished.

Receptive language skills:

• Giving directions on how to pop the bubbles (clap them, jump on them), either one at a time or in a sequence (first clap then jump)

• Describing where the bubbles are and what they’re doing – “the bubbles are going up/down” “there’s a bubble in front of/behind you”

Speech sounds:

• Speech sound targets including /b/ for ‘bubbles’, /p/ for ‘pop’, /m/ for ‘more’

• Any speech sound or target word could be practiced as a bubble is popped.

We hope you’ve enjoyed our Toy Tuesday series! Keep up to date with all our therapy ideas, news and training on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest.