Several months ago I pinned a wonderful idea on Pinterest from Jodi over at Fun in First. She used some dollar store pinwheels to target reading comprehension. I have been keeping my eye out for a deal on them and Target dollar spot didn’t disappoint this weekend! Check out these cute pinwheels! 
I can see endless opportunities! I tried to control the urge to buy 10 pinwheels. So I only came home with 3. Here’s how I used them! During speech, when it was a child’s turn to participate I had them spin the wheel and they complete the action listed where the arrow is pointing! 
I printed little petals with directions, laminated them, and hot glued them onto the pinwheel. For my articulation wheel I added directions like : Spell & Say, Silly Sentence, Rhyme Time, 10 times fast. These make the directions very flexible! One of my favorite’s is ‘Rhyme Time.’ I give the student a word with their target sound at the end of the word and see how many rhymes they can create. Ex: for /s/ I give: ‘KISS’ – miss, bliss, dismiss! 
This is my grammar pinwheel! I added parts of speech, including verbs, pronouns, prepositions. I can use this one many ways! For kids working on grammatical forms (like future and past tense verbs.) I can just give them prompts to target the correct word form. For kids working on expressive language and sentence structure, they spin a part of speech and then I give them a word to use in a sentence. 
The last pinwheel I made is a general language pinwheel! I really love this one because it’s so flexible! My younger students are just working on the basic skills listed, such as synonyms, definitions, categories and WH questions. The beauty of it is that I can work with my older students on curriculum vocabulary with the same item! 
I created the petals on the pinwheels that you can grab here. Just for the record I will be back in Target this week at some point, because I just have to make a WH question spinner and a Social Communication spinner! What other ideas do you have for these awesome finds?!
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Very cute idea! Can’t wait to use this with my little ones.
Amy
TheResource(ful)Room!
LOVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Very cute idea! To make the pinwheels even more versatile, you could put a piece of velcro on each petal on the pinwheel, then put the other side of the velcro on your target petal. This way, you can change the targets out without needing more pinwheels. By laminating and velcroing (spelling??) some blank petals, you can have some handy for those times when you need to make a quick change or think of something to add, and can use a vis-a-vis marker to write on it.
Thanks again for the cute idea – I’m headed to Target tomorrow (hope there’s some left!)
I was just thinking the same idea Lisa E. Would there be any way to get some blank tempaltes uploaded and maybe people would be willing to post what they’re actually going to use it for! It seems like you could make petals for following directions, working on specific parts of speech, word families, spelling, phonemic awareness (have a letter in the middle and different word positions as petals?)… thanks so much Jenna!
It’s funny, the day you posted this I had a little girl BEGGING for us to make a pinwheel during speech. I keep a flower one on my desk and she was so intrigued. Since her speech groupies were not available and it was just her…. that’s just what we did! Unfortunately, my pinwheel making skills are much lacking…
Love this idea! Just made 4 of them! 1)who, what, when, where, why, and your choice; 2) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 (generic for artic-times to say word); 3)synonym, antonyn, similarity, difference, multiple meaning, definition; 4) parts, used for, made of, group, goes with, location. Thanks for all of the wonderful ideas Jenna! You inspire me! Would love to hear about the social communication pinwheel…
Cute! I can see it being used for so many different concepts but also for transitional activities and brain breaks! I’ll be keeping my eyes open for pinwheels in my wanderings…the right time of year to find them!
This is an awesome idea! Thank you!