Marble painting

This fun activity involves placing paper in  a tray, pouring paint on the paper, placing marbles in the tray and rolling the marbles around the tray. The marbles should roll through the paint and create an interesting pattern on the paper! This different arts and craft activity will offer you the opportunity to incorporate a variety of different language targets! Including a wide variety of mands for different coloured paints, different coloured marbles (if available) the tray and for the paper (mand 1-5M, 9M), or a specific number of marbles (maths 11d). There will also be opportunities to contrive motivation for “drop” to drop the marbles in, “shake” or “roll” to move the marbles, or “pour”, “squeeze” to pour the paint (mand 7M). Also “open” can be used to open the paints, or the container the marbles are in (mand 7M, 9M). If you repeat this activity in the future you can encourage your learner to give you the instructions of what to do (mand 14M) or “forget” a required item (mand 6M). This activity offers a lot of opportunities for receptive targets including following instructions (LR* 4M, 12M), identifying common items (LR* 3M, 5M) or colours (LR* 11M, 14M), understanding prepositions (LR* 12M). For instance you can ask your learner “get an apron”, “find the red paint”, “put the tray on the table”, or “squeeze the bottle”. You can change these in to tact targets by asking “What’s this called?” or “What colour?”, “where is the tray?” or “what am I doing?” (tact [items] 1-7M, 10M, 14M [actions] 8M, [colours] 11M, 13M [prepositions] 12M). Some of the actions of squeezing the paint, shaking the tray, or dropping marbles could be converted into motor imitation targets (MI† 1-6M, 9-10M). This activity offers opportunities for maths skills as you can compare sizes, if you have bigger and smaller marbles (LR* 13M, Maths 11b, 14M), or count the marbles (math 11c, 12a 12d, 12M, 13b, 13M) and match numbers to quantity (15M).

Preceding skills reference to the VB-MAPP Assessment tool:

Sundberg, M. L. (2008) Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP. Concord, CA: AVB Press.

*LR: Listener Responding. †MI: Motor Imitation