Toys as Tools: The Hungry Pelican

Hey there! I hope you're having a wonderful summer! I'm stopping in today for a new edition of toys as tools! This year, I started a blog series all about how to use toys to enhance speech and language skills. Toys are such powerful tools! They're motivating, engaging, and fun!

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Today's toy is in honor of summer! The Hungry Pelican is a delightful and interactive toy. He comes with a variety of plush ocean animals - a crab, octopus, fish, and a shrimp. You can open up his bill and feed him! His tummy is open, so you can easily retrieve whatever goes inside!

First, students love to "feed" things! Back in the day, my supervisor had a tiny garbage can that students would "feed." haha... Seriously, kids love it! This is truly a fun toy, because you can pretty much feed the pelican anything! There are so many communication skills you can address with this toy!

1) Vocabulary - Students can learn various ocean animals (crab, shrimp, octopus, etc). Since it's a field of four, you can easily access if a student can differentiate between a crab and a fish! You can also feed the pelican other things that relate to vocabulary too - such as toy foods or flash cards! For instance, if a student can name a synonym they can feed the flash card to the pelican!

2) Prepositions - You can work on inside/outside. For example, the crab is inside the pelican and the octopus is outside the pelican. You can also practice placing the pelican's friends (or snacks haha!) next to him, behind him, in front of him, etc!

3) Directions - This is such a fun toy to practice multistep directions. For example: Before you feed the pelican the crab, give me the fish.

4) Articulation - This is a fun toy for reinforcement! Students can practice a word and then feed the pelican their flash card or object!

5) Requesting - Students can work on requesting which animal or object they would like to feed the pelican. This is also a great toy to work on "more." The pelican wants more food.

6) Opposites - You can work on open/close. Have students open his bill and then close his bill. Hungry/full or full/empty... when his tummy is empty he's hungry and when it's full... well, he's full. lol. You can also talk about big/little. The pelican is big, but the crab is little.

7) Verbs - Students can make the pelican eat or fly. They can make the crab crawl, the fish swim, etc. This is a fun toy for kids to work on actions!

8)  Describing - You can place a variety of objects on the table for students to describe. After they describe the object, they can feed the pelican.  You can also make this more simple and work on two-word phrases with an adjective (ex. "hungry pelican," "red crab," "little fish," etc). You can also play a headband-esque game. Turn the pelican around and one student describes what's in the pelican's belly and the other tries to figure it out!

9) Compare/Contrast - Students can compare/contrast all of the ocean animals! They can also compare themselves to the pelican. For instance, "the pelican is a bird and I'm a human... but we both like fish!" I know I have something in common with the pelican.... we're both always hungry! haha

10) WH Questions - You can place the pelican around the room and ask where he is. You can also work on what questions, why questions (ex. why did the pelican eat the crab?), etc.

Do you have a Hungry Pelican? How do you use him in speech-language therapy?

Thank you for stopping by! I have more Toys as Tools posts coming your way! Have a great day!