Supplemental Sunday: The Humble Name Plate

It's time for Supplemental Sunday again, so here I am with an idea that I use with my students for all types of things. You can see a couple of examples in the picture.

Introducing, the name plate.

Name plates are brightly colored pieces of card stock that have places to write names on them. Elementary school teachers use them to identify desks for their students. They come in many different patterns and color schemes, and I like them for music therapy supplementals as well.

Name plates are usually made out of card stock, making them a bit sturdier than sentence strips and they can be made into prompts, or signs, or choice strips, or sequencing patterns. There is no limit to how these can be adapted for use in a music therapy session. In the example above, you can see several of my movement stations (the pencil ones) and one of my center station signs. The movement stations have permanent words laminated onto the signs. I have about 20 of them - all different types of movements my students can do while inside. The center stations have permanent words on the top, indicating which station is which and blank laminate on the bottom. I use wet-erase markers to indicate what will be happening at each center.

I also use these plates for things like There Was an Old Lady. I list all of the elements of the song and then we arrange and rearrange them to suit our needs during the session. There are lots of things to do with these pretty little pieces of cardstock.

Ladies and gentlemen, the humble name plate!

(By the way, I often find mine in school supply sections of stores.)