Simple Left Right Activity

When working on some concepts with manipulables today, I found a little gem in my box of animals, and thought I'd share it with you.

So many kids struggle to learn their own left and right, but also have difficulty transferring left and right concepts to other people and objects. 

I did the easiest thing in the world.  I took a sharpie and wrote a L on the left side of an animal and R on the right side.  I start by having the kids identify the animals left and right when they are the same as the student's left and right.  Then we move the animal around and see how the left and right stay the same, and how they relate to the left and right of each students.   

I remember working on these left/right and left/right crossover with pictures on my internship with the old BOEHM therapy kit, and the writing on toys method seems to go quicker with my students.  It's highly visual and tactile.  Plus when using toys, I can get my students to work for the first 20 minutes of the session with a playtime reward at the end.  We play and talk about animals for the last 5 minutes while I write down my data.  What more could I ask for?  I really don't know, but I'm pretty sure my second grade boys would like me to take the sharpie to some matchbox cars...

During play time, we talked about how many colors each student choose and what else we'd see on a farm, and how zoo animals are different from farm animals.  Then we correctly labeled which stickers were on the left and right sides of our sticker sheets!

I wrote on animals from an animal counter set from Lakeshore Learning but any thrift store toys would work just as well.  I've been looking for little plastic people for a while, but no luck yet.