Phew, we survived the holidays! I wanted to share what was going on in speech and language therapy during the holidays. The holidays are such a fun time of year especially when you work with little ones. The magical twinkle in their eye and their uncontrollable excitement is contagious! The holidays also provide some opportunities for highly motivating activities!
Holiday Wreaths
We made these holiday wreaths as a way to practice our speech sounds and some language goals. My little friends enjoyed practicing their target words while coloring the “berries” and then we practiced them in short sentences such as “I’m gluing _____.”
Christmas Cookies
We did a project around Christmas Cookies. We read a book about making cookies. It was interactive book where the child got to velcro pictures on the page to sequence the steps in making cookies. Then for some of my younger friends, we colored pictures of Christmas cookies. Once they were done the children had an opportunity to play a christmas cookie app on the iPad. This task had so many opportunities for using language and the children really enjoyed it!
Holiday Question Game and Verbs
For some of those children working on wh-questions, we played a Christmas themed Wh question game. The holidays offer some great new questions to answer. I also introduced some holiday-themed verbs.
Some ideas to work on speech and language goals at home:
- Have your child find items in the toy magazines/christmas ads that start with their target sound for articulation
- Have your child create a Christmas list! If they are too little to write encourage them to point to pictures, cut out pictures if they can, and produce words or phrases to talk about what they want. For the older children have them write words, sentences, or full letters to Santa!
- Let your child help with the baking and cooking. These are great tasks to target following directions, sequencing, etc.