Fall is my favorite time of year. I love the leaves changing, the cooler weather, sweaters with boots, and pumpkin spice lattes. The list could go on for days. Anywho, here are some of my favorite activities to do in therapy for Fall and Thanksgiving.
Articulation:
I like to read 10 Fat Turkeys. In this book the recurring statement is "Gobble, Gobble, Wibble, Wobble." which is just plain fun to say and the kids like to help me read it.
So after reading this book we of course have to make turkeys! Each feather on the turkey's head has a word related to the fall or Thanksgiving. ( I got reprimanded by a 3 year old for having a yellow beak instead of an orange beak. Whoops!)
Fall Articulation Tree:
I pick out words ahead of time that target the student's articulation goals. Then they glue the items onto the tree. As they glue them down they have to tell me the word and then at the end they have to tell me all the weird things on their tree.
Here are the labels I have the kids put on their page so parents know what it was for.
I would also like to suggest you use the sound pages that are in the bottom right corner of this web page. There are a multitude of words for all sounds you might need to target.
Language:
So I don't know about all of you, but I love the There Was An Old Lady books. There are a million and they are really fun.
There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed Some Leaves!
I got the template for the old lady from here. Then found all the items the old lady swallowed and made this sheet in boarmaker. The kids can use this for practicing articulation or can use it for language as a sequencing activity.
I Know An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Pie:
For this book I made a sequencing activity for how to make a pumpkin pie. Click here, here and here for the links to this activity.
Scarecrow Activity:
This is a great activity for expressive and receptive language. Here are directions you can use to work with an array of students and their auditory comprehension needs. Also, to save all of you lovely readers time and energy I've included the different pieces to the scarecrow here.
To work on expressive language, I made two different scarecrows and laminated them in a manilla folder. Set them up like work areas and each child has to give a direction to the other child about how to make their scarecrow look like the one on their work folder. Then at the end each child reveals the scarecrow they've made and see if it matches with the other student's scarecrow laminated into the folder.
Pragmatics:
For my children who have difficutly with asking questions appropriately I like to have a mock Thanksgiving. I print off a number of pictures and the kids pick their favorite Thanksgiving foods and have to ask me or a friend to pass them the food. I always preface it with "Let's pretend we're at Thanksgiving dinner and all the food is at the other end of the table." My hope is that on Thankgiving my kids are able to ask "Can you please pass the turkey?" and everyone says "Oh what nice manners you have!" and the kid says "Yes, I learned this in speech therapy."......a girl can dream, right?
Bulletin Board:
"We're gobbling up speech and language skills!"
I trace the kid's hands and they write words that have to deal with fall or Thanksgiving on each finger. I like to do this before anything else so that the kids can build up that vocabulary before we move into the rest of the Thanksgiving unit. The hands are the turkey's feathers.
I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving. I am thankful for everyone that visits this blog and supports me in what I love doing. I couldn't ask for a better career (I mean today I played Mr. Potato Head and spoke in a British accent!)
