Affordable Articulation Therapy: How to Use TOOBS in Speech

The setting: your speech room.
The characters: you and the articulation student/client you've been working with for a few months now.
The scene: Aforementioned student/client walks into the room, takes one look at the activity you have set out for them, and groans, "Not this again!"

Despite our best intentions, therapy can sometimes get monotonous. There are only so many ways to elicit speech and language goals, and combined with the added requirements of seeing mixed groups, implementing RtI, providing curriculum-based therapy, and just plain settling all of the kids down, sometimes you just have to use a tried-and-true standby like Candy Land or Webber Artic Cards! I was in that position, until I watched Felice Clark (The Dabbling Speechie) talk about her awesome sensory bins during her SLP Summit talk. She mentioned these toys called "TOOBS" that seemed so interesting, so I just had to check them out! Affiliate links included for your convenience.

For anyone wondering, TOOBS are, well, tubes filled with tiny soft-plastic toys of varying categories. **DISCLAIMER: these are appropriate for students 3 and up, due to being so tiny**.  They offer nearly any category you can think of: Coral Reef Creatures, Flowers, Fruits and Vegetables, and even Space! The number of toys varies based on the category, but is usually between 7-12 per TOOB. I love that they all fit in the tube for ease of transport (I'm an itinerant SLP and space is at a premium!), and that the toys themselves are small enough to not overload those sensitive students who are overwhelmed by too many choices. ​

​I chose to use my TOOB to target articulation at the sentence level, but one of the great things about these TOOBS are that you can use them to target any articulation level (word, phrase, sentence, carryover) as well as a plethora of language goals (see below).

1. First, I found a TOOB set that my student was interested in that had multiple items with their target sound. Fortunately, my student likes sharks and is working on /r/ in sentences, but you could choose any number of different TOOBS, or even a phrase to use with them ("I see a ___" for /s/, etc).
2. Secondly, I provided visual support. In this case, I made a simple semantic map so we could describe each shark. You can find it for FREE in my TPT store! I've found that just playing with the toys can be fun and elicit a lot of language, but you can get caught up pretty fast and end the session with everyone happy but without having gotten even 10 repetitions of your target words. Before the session, I made a list of the words I was going to target that I kept in my notebook. During the session, we used my computer to go to Wikipedia and look up information about each shark, and my student wrote down a sentence or two in each part of the semantic map (color/size, food, habitat, and an interesting fact). 
3. Since we were working on sounds at the sentence level, I had the student go through and highlight each /r/ word, then say the sentence to me using their best speech ( i.e. "The nurse shark is very slow"). 

​And there you have it: articulation with TOOBS!

You can use them to target different speech goals, including:

• Categories
• Describing/comparing
• Narrative structure: make up a story with some or all of the characters in a TOOB
• Curriculum support: there are toys for nearly every unit that my preschoolers study (Community Helpers, Farm, Transportation, etc). 
• Attributes
• Wh- questions
• Story re-tell: have the student describe a story from class using the TOOB characters

I hope you found this interesting and can add it to your arsenal of Speech Tricks and Tips! If you found this helpful or have any of your own tips or tricks for TOOBS, let me know in the comments!