Are you ready for a new school year? As we head back to school, there are easy, inexpensive ways to safeguard your speech therapy materials. Making these changes will help minimize your students’ exposure to viruses. In addition to your hand sanitizer and cleaning wipes, we need to think outside the box to protect our students and ourselves.
As we attempt to adhere to the “6-feet” rule and wear masks, there are also changes we can make to reduce the number of items we are sanitizing in between sessions.
Taking Inventory and Setting Up
First, take inventory of your materials and remove items that are more difficult to sanitize including stuffed animals, felt boards, pillows and bean bags.
Next, set up designated trays or bins for student materials. You can use color supply caddies with color-coordinated materials to help student easily identify their materials. This will help decrease the number of items being touched by multiple students.
Speech Therapy Materials
Let’s talk board games! We enjoy using board games during speech therapy and they are highly reinforcing for our students. But let’s be honest, how often do you sanitize your board games after each session? You can make inexpensive adjustments to limit the surfaces students are touching during the game. Ashley, from Sweet Southern Speech shared how she uses Press N Seal wrap to cover the board. GENIUS! You can also swap out the actual game pieces for something that is disposable. Scrapes of paper are perfect for creating personalized game pieces that can be thrown away immediately after playing.
Up next, sensory bins! Sensory bins are perfect for providing tactile stimulation and engaging students during the session, but they can also be the source for spreading germs. Rice, beans and beads are great “fillers’ for our bins, but they are also difficult to sanitize. Solution? SHREDDED PAPER. We are always shredding confidential documents, so this substitute is easily accessible and FREE! By filling your sensory bins with shredded paper, you can immediately throw it away after the session.
If you want to keep the “sensory bin” feel without the tactile input, you can use clear, plastic jars with wide lids. You can easily sanitize these at the end of each session or even in between student use.
Another sensory favorite is play-doh! This year I plan on “assigning” play-doh to my students. You can label each play-doh with the student’s name and avoid multiple students touching the same play-doh.
Use Boom Cards
Boom Cards are easily accessible on an iPad. You can quickly clean the iPad in between each student. Boom Cards limit the materials you are prepping and the number of surfaces students can touch. WIN! WIN! You can learn more about using Boom Cards during speech therapy in this post.
I hope these tips make you feel a little less stressed about safeguarding your speech therapy materials against viruses. If you have more ideas, let me know in the comments!
