It's Halloween in My Speech Room!

This week my fellow Frenzied SLPs and I are blogging about Halloween-themed language activities.  

Let's get real, Halloween week at school is ROUGH.  

To top it off, we have a full moon and Hurricane Patricia dumping torrential rains on us here in Louisiana.  Here are some ideas from me to you that might help keep things calm and productive in your speech room! 

I love love love the book The Biggest Leaf Pile by Steve Metzger.  It's not Halloween themed, but it is fall themed and it's spurred lots of learning in my therapy room this month. 

I love that it addresses friendship and character. 

We read the book and made our own leaf piles with silk and paper leaves. 

We also created the characters from the book.  On this day, my students both chose to make Yellow Hickory who is just one of the 4 main characters.  You can grab this leaf template along with instructions on how to use them with the book HERE. It's only available to my blog readers :)

We have also been working on concepts (many, few, 2, only, round, pointed, happy, shapes, etc)

using my Halloween Cariboo freebie!  I've even used it to work on where, what and who questions...What can we eat? Who has a tail? Where can you live? Where do bats and birds live? Who has a cape?  Who has triangle eyes? Who is sleeping? Who is smiling? What has whiskers? What can we wear? What has legs? 

We've been reading plenty of Halloween books. 

We have worn out The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything along with hand motions, wiggling, shaking, clapping and clomping.  My non-verbal and limited verbal kids were able to participate, too, because my graduate student and I used my FAVORITE handy, dandy free app, Sounding Board.  Read more about how to use Sounding Board at this blog post.

Later this week, we will be reading Five Little Pumpkins....

...along with 5 real little pumpkins.

My upper elementary students and I have been reading non-fiction fall passages from Nicole Allison and playing some seasonal themed board games as reinforcement for answering questions correctly. I was able to address soooooo many ELA skills with these passages! 

We've also been reading the Young Observer book on vampire bats. I highly recommend the Young Observer books by Phillip Steele. 

We've been working on answering all kinds of wh-questions (and how to answer them while restating the question) using my Halloween trivia and games. This is also perfect for getting a true picture of  articulation and fluency carryover.  If you have two kids (or teams compete) by ringing in first to see who can correctly answer the question, the time pressure is a great test of how strong and automated their artic and fluency skills really are. Plus, my kids BEG for this.  

On Wednesday and Thursday, we will be making these spider snacks as one of our therapy activities!! This is just great for sequencing, following directions and lots of discussion about spiders. 

Besides, who doesn't love to eat in therapy? HELLOOOOOOO no one! 

Happy Halloween, y'all!!