Movin' Mondays: Spooky Speech Fun!

I absolutely LOVE Halloween.  It's my second favorite time of year, second only to Christmas.  I have an entire BOX full of Halloween materials for speech that I look forward to using every year!

Here are some of my favorite up-and-moving activities for Halloween week!

1.  Toilet Paper Ghost bowling

I saw this on Pinterest (link here) during my first year in the schools, and have had a blast with it every year! I typically do this with an artic group of 2-- one kid practices their words, then bowls, and while they are setting the ghost pins back up, the other kid is practicing their words.  The second kid bowls, and while they are bowling/setting back up, that first student is practicing speech words again.  That way, each kid is busy with something and there's not much down time where a student is just waiting for their turn.

I also just saw a variation of this activity today from a new blog, Cheerful Speech Chatter, using bowling pins.. super cute!  http://cheerfulspeechchatter.blogspot.com/2013/10/ghost-bowling.html


2.  Pumpkin beanbag toss

This is pretty simple, but my kids love beanbags! I had them toss beanbags onto a pumpkin, and they had to tell me the number on the pumpkin they landed on (working on number recognition).  The number on the pumpkin was either the number of times they said their speech words (with artic cards) or the number of cards they had to do before their next turn (with the language kids; ie 4 pronoun cards, 2 vocab cards, etc.. Or, you could do it this way with artic, too, and have them do 3 cards 5x each or 4 cards 5x each, etc... for even more repetitions!).  You could modify this for kids working on MLU and put pictures underneath the beanbag and have them use 3 word phrases like ("I got ___"   "I found ___" or "___ under pumpkin" etc...)

One of the preK teachers I worked with last year had some super cool beanbags that one of our previous preschool parents had sewn her, and one of the beanbags was made from a skull & crossbones pattern-- perfect for Halloween and my little boys LOVED using it for this activity.  They asked for it almost all every. single. time.  Unfortunately, I don't work with that teacher anymore so I no longer have access to the skull & crossbones beanbag -- I think I need to learn how to sew just so I can make a set for myself! Surely it can't be too difficult, right?!

3.  Ghost Footprints

I got the inspiration for this from the blog, "Toddler Approved."  I modified it a bit to fit my needs, and used these Fall Concepts Bingo pieces to tape on to the ghost footprints.  The kids have to listen for a specific picture to find (i.e. find the pumpkin UNDER the table, ON TOP of the table, etc...) and then hop onto that footprint to "catch" the ghost before he floats away.  The kids were giggling the whole time... Oh to be a preschooler again... :)

4.  Trick or Treating with speech cards

I'm pretty sure I saw this idea somewhere out there in blog-land/Pinterest a couple years ago, but I have no idea where I saw it first.  I have a couple little trick or treat bags like this one below from the Target $1 Spot

I taped pictures of candy pieces to the back of speech cards, and then hid the cards around the room.  The kids got to "trick or treat" around the room and collect as many pieces of "candy" as they could to fill their trick or treat bags! We practiced each word before putting them in the bag.  Again, you could modify this in any way to fit your kids' goals! You could work on increasing sentence length by using phrases like "__ in ghost" (or whatever your bag is) "Ghost eats ___," or "Put in ___."  

Check back tomorrow for a post on a few Halloween-themed crafts I like to do in therapy, too! What are some of your favorite Halloween activities to do in speech?