Everybody loves halloween so a pumpkin, ghost or candy activity sure perks up a speech therapy session. ASHAsphere just posted an article , “BOO, Halloween Treats” listing lots of activities shared by SLP’s, where I found these cute Halloween pictures for vocabulary, language, word-finding and articulation activities (at Speaking of Speech).
I made 2 copies of the pictures for a memory match game and made some blank cards for kids to add their halloween words that I had missed. I find that the kids I work with individually are always interested in the other kids I work with that are their age. Often they will enjoy the pictures I collect with other children for Speech Bin, especially if they are both working on the same sounds. It happened again with the memory game. I went to 3 houses to work with kids in succession and they each added their own illustrated halloween words–ghost, spider, cauldron, vampire and skeleton! They loved the drawings from other kids.
Word-finding: First I brainstormed with my student to come up with as many words we could that had to do with halloween. When he named one that matched my pictures, I gave it to him. If he named one that I didn’t have a picture of, he drew it. For some reason, I particularly like the spider!! Then we started our memory game. As he turned over 2 cards, he named them and had to give me a descriptive sentence using one of the words. One little friend said, “The skeleton is sitting on my front porch. He is very careful.” I said that is such an interesting word, what do you mean by that? to which he replied after pausing to retrieve the correct word, “He is delicate!” It was a great opportunity to increase his awareness of having some difficulty retrieving words. We both smiled at the recognition that he had a little trouble finding his word but paused and then got it.
As my students made up their sentences, we worked on recognizing a vague sentence versus a descriptive one. I used one hand to repeat their phrase, “scary stuff” and the other hand to say their revision which was “scary spooky ghosts.” Which one is better language? They practiced identifying the difference in my sentences as well as theirs.