Therapy Tip: Teaching Shapes with Crackers

It's Thursday! You know what that means-it's Therapy Thursday!
This is the day that I share a tip based upon my experience as a pediatric speech-language pathologist and a mother of a child with special needs.

Today's tip is:

Teaching Shapes with Crackers

If you are like me, you get bored teaching the same old concepts the same old way. Once in awhile, it's great to use some other method to change things up for me and the child. So, today's tip is a simple way to change up teaching the concept of shapes.

I heard about this idea in a seminar from Cari Ebert. (She has great seminars by the way!) Basically, you find and purchase crackers that are in different shapes. Then, you can use these crackers for your lesson.

Here's the crackers I purchased to get the shapes I wanted. 

The club crackers give rectangles. Ritz crackers are the circles. Saltines are perfect squares, and the pita crackers are triangles. 

The hardest part with this activity is to keep the child from eating the crackers right away. 😊

Then you can do the following things:

-Matching: Simply, lay out 2 of each cracker and have the child match the shapes up to each other.

Another way to match is to spread out the child's crackers. You will have a matching set of crackers too. Pick one of your crackers up and ask the child to find the one that looks like yours. 

A final way to do matching would be to quickly draw out the shapes on a piece of paper. Then have the child match the cracker shapes to the shapes on the paper. 

-Identification: Lay out 2 or 4 of the shapes/crackers depending on how well the child is doing with shapes. Have the child point to the shape that you name. Bonus: They can eat the shape that you name.

-Labeling: Hold up a shape/cracker and have the child tell you what shape it is. 

That's it! It's simple, but it's a fun way to change up teaching shapes. Enjoy! 

Therapy Thursday is for educational purposes only and not intended to be therapeutic advice.