by Dawn Pawz

Created on: May 28, 2010   Last Updated: May 31, 2010

You will find that almost every special education class will utilize the ever popular Bingo game.  It can be adjusted to any age, and designed to meet different needs.  You can focus on science, math, social, or language skills.  Teachers or other special education professionals can easily make the boards to suit the area of need that best suits the needs of the class, or of the specific group of children in focus.  I use bingo for speech language,  working with sounds and even language goals.  I can customize the board to a certain few sounds that I am working on with a set of children.  I work with pre-school children, so I like to work with age developmental, bilabial sounds, when both lips come together, such as b, p and m. 

Another game that I like to play with school age children is Bowling for Bunnies.  It's simple and fun, they try to knock over as many bunny pins as possible with the plastic bowling ball.   This works the motor skills and helps to build peer interaction, language, pragmatics (the ability to understand another's intent and meaning in social communication)  and articulation (ability to make speech sounds) all in one.  Even math can be worked into the session.

For the pre-school group another interactive game in special education is passing the bean bag.  This works on building an awareness of ones surroundings and following directives and focus.  They listen to the song and pass the bean bag until it says to put the bean bag down.  Then the person next to them needs to pick up the bean bag and continue.  This may seem easy for you and I, but for someone with focus issues this is difficult.  It is walking them through a step by step process in a fun way. 

We also do a lot of matching one image to the same image.  We will have a fun card of animals and then have some matching bean bags or cubes and they are to match the images.  This builds on object identification, cognition, and helps elicit verbalization and basic communication.  We try to match each game to each child's particular interest.  If we have a group of children that enjoys  animals we will have an activity that we involve them in,  if another group enjoys race cars then we try to create a game with a race track and add stickers that serve as reinforcers for each activity participated in.  The more exciting the activity is for each child, the better the overall learning and outcome will be.  Let the games begin, shall we?

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