By: Shareka Bentham, SLT copyright 2010. Shareka Bentham, SLT
This blog post has been reprinted with express permission of the author as it appeared on her blog Easy Speech and Language Ideas
First of all I’d like to thank you all for your feedback on my last blog post “Green Analogies”. I really appreciate it and am glad that you liked my random ramblings. I was able to draw reference to the analogy last night, as I gave a talk to a church congregation on children’s speech and language development, and it was well received 🙂
Those who have been following my blog, would know that I love making resources, and I love when therapy tools can be used for a range of topics. Last week I bought my most useful therapy tool so far: my magnetic white board. It was on sale too!
Everyone loves it and I’ve been trying to find lots of different ways to use it in therapy. This was aided by my trusty laminator and some adhesive magnetic strip.
I wanted to share with my readers some of the cool uses of my new companion:
This one worked on categorising sky, sea and land, as both a receptive and an expressive task.

This next one is my favourite, as I love the “Five little monkeys” rhyme. The children love that Mr. Crocodile can actually snatch the monkeys off the “tree”.

The next one I adapted from a file folder game which works on big and little. Children have to choose the big or little object called, then put it on the appropriate side of the board.

Another one I made up on the spot was for prepositions ‘on’ vs ‘under’, which worked a lot better than I thought.

It also came in handy when I had to quickly draw some minimal pairs for /s/ and /n/ in final position, but those ones I definitely won’t dare to share (they were ridiculed enough during the session).
These are my newest resources so far for my white board, but I have a few running around in my head which I will try to make over the next week, and share as an update to this post.
I want to hear from you readers. Do you use white boards in therapy? How do you use them?
Featured Author: Shareka Bentham, SLT
From her blog: My name is Shareka Bentham, I’m a Speech and Language therapist (also known as a Speech Pathologist in some countries), working in private practice. I earned my Masters in New Zealand and returned to Barbados to practice. I’m quite a newbie in the field, as this is my first year practising, but I’ve learnt a lot thus far. There aren’t many speech therapists in my country, one working in government, and the remaining 4 or so in private practice catering to a population of approximately 275,000. Needless to say I have a pretty hectic caseload with a range of communicative needs. I work with both paediatric and adult populations with speech, language, social communication voice, fluency, and feeding disorders and my settings range from clinic, hospitals, and house/school visits. I’m also the in-house therapist at one primary school, so yes it gets quite busy.