Building A Sensory Light Table (on the cheap!)

I've been adding elements to our sensory room (I promise to post a new picture soon!). I wanted to make sure to address visual sensory needs more fully, so this weekend I built a light table. The requirements for this project was that the finished result needed to be:

(1) easy to build

(2) easy to store

(3) super cheap.

I stumbled across an Ikea Lack end table on clearance for $4 last week and picked it up hoping it would be something I could use for this project. Even if I'd had to buy it, the sale price was only $7, so that wouldn't have broken the bank. I've also seen these often on Craigslist.

The only other supply I needed to purchase was something to cover the top. Originally, I wanted to use plexiglass, but after pricing the size sheet I would need, I decided that the $25 price tag was more than I was willing to spend. Instead, I picked up a sheet of plastic paneling that covers florescent light fixtures. It cost $9.

The last item I needed was lights. Buying short florescent light fixtures was going to bump the cost back up, so I snagged a strand of 100 white Christmas lights.

Now, the how-to:

The top of the Ikea lack table is actually filled with corrugated cardboard and covered with a thick layer of laminate. I measured about 2" in from each side and started scoring through the laminate with a utility knife. This took a little while and a little muscle. Once I got through the laminate, I had to stick the end of my utility knife in and wiggle it back and forth to force through the final underlayer of laminate.

Pry up the laminate. You'll see the cardboard beneath.

Scrape out the cardboard. Get rid of all the loose bits clinging to the glue at the bottom.

Paint the bottom with white craft paint and a sponge brush. This does NOT have to be perfect. You'll never see it. You just want to white to help reflect the light.

Screw your table legs in place.

Now, the tricky part. Because I didn't want to invest in a battery pack, I had to create a hole large enough to fit the female end of the light string. The largest drill bit I own is 1/2" which wasn't large enough. So, I did a combo of drilling a couple of holes close together and then using a large flat head screwdriver as a chisel and hammer to break away the remaining wood. Is it pretty? No. Is it functional? Yes. And I figured since it would be facing the wall, I'd just touch it up with a little white paint and no one would be the wiser!

Feed the lights through the opening leaving just the plug portion exposed to attach to an extension cord.

Arrange the lights across the surface. To keep them from shifting, I tacked some of the cords in place with a little clear packing tape. If I'd had a choice of lights, I would rather have used ones with white cords. But finding Christmas lights in March is not easy! I decided I either had to be less picky and ignore the green cords, paint them, or wait to build this once stores started stocking for Christmas. I voted for ignoring!

Now, I had to cover the top. Here's what NOT to do! Sigh. The width of the light panel was a little less than 1/4" larger than I needed. I elected to let it overlap each side about 1/8" instead of trying to cut the brittle plastic. The problem was that the entire panel was 48" and I only needed two pieces measuring 21 1/2". At first I tried scoring it with the utility knife with no luck. We're talking brittle hard plastic. 

So, I finally got frustrated and slowly bent the two pieces together *hoping* that it would just split in half. Well.....it did, but not evenly. One side was fine. The other had a corner break off. And shards of brittle plastic shooting all over my kitchen. Yikes. I do NOT advise being impatient like me! In retrospect, I would have wrapped masking or painters tape on both sides of the plastic and either tried to cut it with a jigsaw or a router. It still might come out a little uneven, but I suspect it would be better than my mess. If you have the money (or are too perfectionistic to live with imperfections!), order plexiglass or an acrylic sheet cut to size. If you go the route I did, just know that it will NOT be perfect. But it will work. If I worked in a clinical setting where we might use this table many hours a day, I would spend the extra money. But since I'm in a classroom setting where we will only use it in short increments across the day, this will be durable enough for our purposes. Use your judgment.

Because of the flex of the plastic, I laid the two bumpy sides together, so the strength would be doubled. It worked well and also helped by bluring the view of the light strings.

Last, apply a little tape on the corners of the plastic, lay it in place and drill a hole in each corner. Peel off the tape, clean away your sawdust, and use wood screws to attach.

We are using our light table with translucent geometric shapes. Magnatiles are on my wish list to add to our light table stash. We also plan to do artwork by covering the table in translucent plastic wrap (to prevent seepage) and then use additional clear plastic sheets to paint or draw on. The play of light on different art materials will be great fun! 

Questions? Post them below in the comments! Happy light table building! ~Kelley

Hands-on Lesson on Using Your Filter by Kelley

Here's a quick hands-on lesson to illustrate the concept of using your verbal filter to keep the group feeling calm.

We define what a thought is...

We use thought bubbles and various pictures to identify main topics group members like to think about.

We then discuss the idea of "smooth" vs "prickly" thoughts and comments. Smooth thoughts and comments are those that keep the group feeling calm and keep the interaction moving forward. Prickly thoughts and comments are those that make others feel uncomfortable and stop the interaction. Here's the visual that we use for prickly and smooth interactions. You can download it here.

We pass around a smooth ball and a prickly ball to further reinforce the concept of which was more comfortable.

After reviewing the smooth vs prickly concept, we define what a filter is and why we use filters in our communities (coffee, cleaning water, etc). We then introduce the idea of a brain filter that keeps prickly thoughts in our heads and allows smooth thoughts to be verbalized.

You'll need a container, a pitcher of water, a strainer, food coloring, a bag of small sticks/rocks/mulch, and small strips of laminated paper with a sharpie marker.

We ask the group to decide on a color that will represent smooth thoughts. This was a minefield of negotiation and group decision making in itself! Finally, they came to the decision that they would use blue food coloring to represent smooth thoughts.

We mix up the blue water in the pitcher and then identify various prickly comments that could disrupt an interaction and cause prickly thoughts in others. We write them down with a sharpie on laminated strips of paper and added them along with the sticks (which represented other prickly comments or behaviors such as turning away when a peer is talking or interrupting) to the water pitcher.

We then pour the contents through the strainer (representing our brain filter) to model keeping the prickly comments in our heads and letting the smooth comments be expressed.

I hope that you'll find this activity to be helpful in your social and speech groups!

Feelings and Emotions ~ Literacy, Language and Social Communication Activities ~by Orlanda

Whew! It's been a while since I have posted, but Kelley and I have been working HARD in our speech and special education classrooms and trying to balance work life and home life! We have spent the last few weeks with a focus on FEELINGS and EMOTIONS with many of our students. We have been using the Emotions Cue Card created by Kelley in all of our sessions to help our students identify their own emotions at the beginning of each social group session. We have found that some of our students have difficulty describing their own emotional state, so we talk about it every week!

Kelley and I work together with a wide variety of students with language, social communication and social behavioral needs and this topic is ongoing for all of these students. In addition, I work with many students with language impairments that have difficulty describing feelings as it relates to others or characters in stories that are read and heard as well as in their own oral and written expression. So, in addition to the groups that we teach together, I have been working on this skill with ALL of my groups. I even managed to incorporate many articulation goals with this lesson, here's how I did it....

We started in our social groups and speech/language groups reading these stories:

 

The Way I Feel was great with ALL of our young age groups (3 year olds-2nd grade students). It was easy to modify the language throughout the story and match emotions pictures. Today I Feel Silly & Other Moods That Make My Day was was great for students Kindergarten through 2nd grade because it had more words and more details in the pictures throughout the story. How Are You Peeling? Foods with Moods was a little too "abstract" for my younger students to recognize the feelings or emotions depicted in the photos, but it was great for my 1st and 2nd grade students. While we read each of these books, we had the Emotions Cue Card handy to match feelings from the book to the photos on the cue card. Additionally, I collected many other Emotions Photos to match feelings and emotions throughout these stories. Several of our students have difficulty understanding and seeing that people depict similar emotions in slightly different ways, so we wanted to offer a variety "faces" for our students to help them see and understand the similarities/differences between faces and feelings. Here is one page of the Emotions Photos that I used for my students to match and describe emotions.

This Emotions Photos document is 4 pages of photos depicting Happy, Sad, Mad/Frustrated, Calm, Scared and Tired. You can grab it here. I turned these photos into cards by cutting the pictures out and laminating them onto large index cards.

While reading all of the Feelings books, we targeted goals such as Answering Basic Questions, Describing details in pictures and using Inference to determine the character's feelings. Each time we read the books, we used the Emotions Photos to match the feelings of the characters. For students in articulation therapy, we continued to use these books and activities and were able to focus on phonemes such as /f, s, sm, sk, l/ to name a few.

After reading each of the stories (over 2-3 sessions), we started making our own book of feelings. With our young kindergarten group, we have several students with low receptive/expressive language skills and poor social communication skills. In this group, we have targeted each emotion in our own book in 1-2 sessions. We started each "emotion exploration" using a computer software program called Faceland.

We LOVE this program because it teaches the students what "clues" to look for on faces to determine the emotion. Each new emotion that is taught is broken into 2-3 facial cues from the eyebrows/forehead, eyes, and mouth. This program also allows the students to see the same emotion depicted in slightly different ways between different people. There are also questions that it asks, and the students have to match the situation to the emotion. For our young students, we often have to act/draw out these questions to help them understand; however, it really helps them learn the feelings. There are even follow up games that go along with each emotion, so it is very engaging!

After going through Faceland, we started making our own book called "My Book of Feelings". Here are some sample pages from this book:

We took pictures of our students depicting the emotion that was stated on each page. This was easiest to do during our Faceland activities for some of our students. Others just needed the Emotions Cue Card or Emotion Photos and a mirror to match their own faces to the feelings. Some students enjoyed taking their picture using the iPad with the camera in "reverse" mode so that they could see themselves making the faces. Still, some of our youngest students (3 year olds) had a hard time making the faces that they were not feeling in the moment, so we improvised by using other pictures or catching them in the act! Needless to say, this was one of the most fun parts of the activity, and all of our students LOVE seeing pictures of themselves in their own books! Here is how one turned out!

Our students with expressive language impairments had some difficulty independently coming up with "things that make me feel ___" so I created a document with pictures for the kids to choose from. A sample of this document is pictured, but you can grab the entire document HERE.



We also found that different students had different feelings about the pictures offered. For example, one of our students feels HAPPY when tying her shoes but another said that this made him feel FRUSTRATED because it was hard for him.

For our youngegst students, we also used the Emotions Photos cards to discuss Similarities and Differences and the "I Feel __ When" cards to Categorize emotions. For our older students in speech/language therapy, we continued expanding this lesson by coming up with synonyms for the feeling words and using them to re-tell or create stories of our own. In their Book of Feelings, we made it harder by having them expand their own stories with their personal experiences.

This has been a great activity for ALL of our students. We have had the opportunity to learn so much about them and they have really improved their ability to describe their feelings and the feelings of others. AND, they will be able to share their books with their families for ongoing conversations at home!

We hope you find these activities useful with the speech, language, and social communication needs of your students! We'd love to know How You Feel about these activities and how we can make them even better!

   ~~Orlanda

Easy Lessons to Target Play Skills & Sharing

Orlanda and I have spent a considerable amount of time over the past 6 weeks in our collaborative speech/social thinking groups working with our "littles" on basic play skills and sharing. We have two small groups (4 kids each) that we needed to target these skills. One group is made up solely of Kinder students who have significant speech and language delays (both articulation and pragmatic language) and ADHD. The second group is made up of Kinder and 1st grade students who all have pragmatic language deficits, but are "higher" than the first group. The students in this group have Autism Spectrum Disorder and Speech Impairment.

We grouped the lessons in this unit into indoor play skills and outdoor play skills.
During the outdoor play lessons we listed different activities that the kids like to play outside and which were solitary activities vs activities they do with others. After choosing a few of the most common activities on the lists, we taught the explicit rules and defined the "hidden rules" for those activities. We read portions of The Social Skills Picture Book by Jed Baker, PhD that related to outdoor play.

We then took the kids outside to the Kinder playground when no other students were outside to practice taking turns with the balls and playing a simple game that required joint attention. The kids did a great job.

Next, we began to target indoor play skills. We specifically wanted to make sure to address the kinds of activities the kids engage in Kindergarten and 1st grade "centers". We again made lists of activities they did indoors and divided them into solitary vs activities done with others. We read applicable parts from The Social Skills Picture Book again and discussed "hidden rules" for playing with others during centers. We spent several sessions watching and discussing the lessons on sharing and taking turns from Playtime with Zeebu. The kids loved Zeebu and it provides a great anchor to remind students to share in the inclusion setting.

We spent a session reading a picture book on sharing. For the Kinder students with less language sophistication, we read Will Sheila Share? by Elivia Savadier. For the combo Kinder/1st grade group, we read I Am Extremely Absolutely Boiling by Lauren Child.

Finally, we spent several sessions practicing sharing and indoor play. During the first session, we used wooden trains and train tracks (which worked really well since there is an example of sharing/not sharing with trains in the Zeebu video). During the second session we used Legos. Before the first session we spent time teaching various phrases that could be used to initiate play and to help facilitate sharing using this visual.

When we played with train tracks I initially "controlled" access to the tracks handing out one or two to each child and then prompting them to use the scripts to ask for more from me or from a peer. When we did the Lego activity, Orlanda gave each child a small pile of Legos that they eagerly started building with individually. Sure enough, they soon wanted more. They were prompted to ask a friend for a piece. Ya gotta love a little sabotage! :) We do have a few students who we wanted to target accepting "no thanks" from their peer for an answer while we also had one particular student who tends to get run over by his peers and we wanted to help him know it was ok to say "no thanks" at times. This led to some interesting interactions!

I have worked on generalizing the skills from small group to the inclusion classroom by using this powerpoint social story. I just load it on one of the classroom computers in the specific classrooms and prompt the kids to read it (either independently or with me) before center time. Feel free to download it for your use!

Click here to download the "Playing with a Partner" Social Story

I hope that you will find the lesson ideas and tools to be useful with your students.  ~ Kelley

Tips for Organizing Small Classroom Spaces & Therapy Rooms

Do you need help for going from this:

to this?

Maybe we can help!

If you are a special education teacher or a speech language pathologist working in a school setting, then you are probably no stranger to working in small or tight quarters. In many cases, specialized teachers or therapists have to share or borrow spaces to serve students. Our experiences over the years have really shaped how we set up our space in ways that we feel are vital to the success of our students, whether we are working in a "broom closet" or have an entire classroom to ourselves! We've put together this list of "tips" to consider when preparing your small work space, we hope you find it helpful!

#1~Everything in your space should be PURPOSEFUL and USEFUL to you and your students. We are guilty of falling into the trap of purchasing something for our workspace because of how "cute" it is or how it looks to represent our "style" (or sometimes because it is a great "deal"). However, as the needs of our students are often changing, we have learned to "Let Go" of some of those miscellaneous items in our rooms. Now, don't get us wrong, we have certain items that are personal (like family photos) or items that contribute to our sanity (such as that picture of our toes in the sand from the summer to remind us of the peace we felt in paradise). BUT, these personal items are minimal and reserved for the "student free zone" in our space. Here is a photo of the "student free zone" in the speech room.

The biggest challenge of this task was actually determining "where" in the room this space would go. We have both had challenges in our spaces of where to place ourselves so that we make our space feel bigger and so that we can see the door and no one can creep up on us! It was also important to make it seem "un-interesting" so that students wouldn't be distracted and want to spend time in that space. Of course, the occasional wanderer travels into this zone and is promptly redirected to a "student friendly" spot.

#2~Consider reducing the amount of "Visual Noise" that is present in the space.

We all have those VISUAL TOOLS that we NEED on the wall, bulletin board, or within arms reach. The REAL question is, do they ALL need to be hanging in our rooms at the same time? Is there a better, more efficient, and less visually distracting way to access these tools? How can we prioritize the tools that are necessary for the majority of our students? These are just a few of the questions we ask ourselves when we make a choice to hang something on the wall, whether temporarily or permanently. After all, the majority of our students learn best when verbal information can be paired with VISUAL information.

We encourage you to think about ways to promote student focus and attention toward your target concept, especially when your specialized instruction "time" is limited. We highly encourage the use of visuals to assist when teaching, but we have also learned that many of the students that we work with have a hard time focusing their attention and/or have difficulty learning in an environment with too much visual stimulation. 

In the speech room, the "permanent" visuals are now limited to The Whole Body Listening Visual, The Speech Target, the Good Speech Posture Poster the Speech Lab visual schedule. I also made a small poster that says "Everything we Say and Do in the Speech Room must be Rated E or G" (some of my students were getting a little out of hand!). Find it Here.

Here are some photos of the visuals hanging in our rooms:

This incentive system is located on the wall BEHIND where the students sit.
So, they sit with their backs to this board, and that REALLY helps!

Another good idea for decreasing visual noise is to cover open book shelves. As I visited many classroom websites, this has been a fairly common theme. In the speech room, this was accomplished with curtains and tension rods. We also focused on choosing fabric that wasn't too visually stimulating. With this simple idea, the "game" shelf (that every student loves to browse in) went from this:

to this,



This was the "old" curtain. . .



to this!

Now, this shelf is MUCH LESS visually distracting, and the
students are less likely to inquire about the contents of the shelf.

Decreasing the "visual noise" in this space has probably been the most NOTICEABLE change. This year, everyone (students included) who walks into the speech room has either said that the room feels "bigger", "calmer", or "welcoming". Many have also asked if I took anything out of the room. All that changed was removing unnecessary visuals from the wall and moving them to a place where I can pull them when needed, and changing the "coverings". What a difference it has made!



#3-Consider creating "Zones" for different types of activities.

We already mentioned the "student free" zone; every teacher and therapist needs one! But, we also have zones in the speech therapy room for different types of learning and different types of learners.

The speech therapy room is divided into three main "zones": The Flower Table, The Carpet, and The Computer.

The Flower Table is where most of the speech therapy takes place for the school-aged population. This is where ALL kinds of therapy happens from articulation games, to story telling/retelling, to Play Dough play. This table is AWESOME! It has space for 6 people and offers lots of space for all kinds of activities.

The Carpet is where the majority of speech therapy takes place for the 3-5 year old population including story-based therapy, play-based therapy, and movement activities. The carpet is small, about 16 X 20, so as not to overtake the small therapy space. It's just enough room for 2-4 small children. The rolling easel pictured also has a felt board on the other side. The Rolling stool is great because you can move around quickly and are close the the floor, and it even has a little tray underneath for storing materials.

We recognize that many small spaces don't often have enough room for a teacher zone, a table, AND a carpet area; however, we highly encourage you to consider your population and the amount of "free movement" space that they might need. In such cases, maybe we can combine an area such as the teacher space and table space.

Although it's not pictured here, The Computer is very useful for lots of therapy activities such as watching video models, engaging in educational & motivational computer programs, and using PowerPoint presentations for articulation practice or auditory bombardment.

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We hope you find these simple tips helpful when setting up, organizing or re-organizing your small space! We hope to have pictures up soon of Kelley's special education room where we collaboratively teach many of our students. We'd also love to hear from you! What have you used in your small space to maintain an inviting and functional learning environment?

~Orlanda