I love to look at Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest and get ideas of fun activities to try in therapy sessions. Most of the time, I find something that I can make work well by adapting it. One day I saw a video of little boys looking through a glass in a pan of water to see different stickers. I thought that would be a huge mess, so I changed the activity by using beans instead to work on I See. It worked great. I thought, “Wow! Pinterest Win!” Well, for every win, there must be a loss.
This week I saw a really cute video on a post by Playtivities.com. They played a game they called the “Yank Me” game.
The video shows a really cute little girl pulling out these papers with such ease! (I now realize they had a LOT of practice.) I thought, “I can do that in therapy!” Instead of the pieces of paper, I used articulation cards. I found some old coffee cups in the teacher lounge, and thought, “this will be great!” I set everything up on my desk before my students came in to try it out. I was able to pull the cards out and make the cups fall onto each other. So I figured I was good to go for using this in a session with some second grade articulation students. I would have the student pull the card and then make a sentence using the word. Great, right?
I set it all up on my therapy table and was ready to go.
My first student tried to pull out a card. Instant fail. The cups fell everywhere.
We re-stacked the cups and tried again. Instant fail. My students and I persisted though, and kept re-stacking the cups again and again. All fails.
The only non-fail of the activity was that my students thought it was pretty hilarious that we couldn’t get it to work. And, they didn’t believe me that I actually did it at my desk! During our tries, my students were still making their sentences, so there was still a lot of practice going on. After several multiple dozens of attempts at this new game, they finally asked, “Can we just do that new bunny game?”
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| See below for link to this cute game! |
Yes, yes you can!
What I learned today, is that every idea that looks great on paper doesn’t always work out in practice, and that is ok! There are going to be a lot of fails when we try new things, but that shouldn’t stop us from trying. I know that my students persisted and had fun with it, but the activity just wasn’t “in the cards” for us today.
** A lot of you have asked where I got this game. Here is an amazon affiliate link for this Jumping Jack game: