Easy Peasy Playdough Monsters for Language Therapy

Halloween is just around the corner, so it’s all talk of costumes, monsters, and creepy crawlies around here! The kids get SO excited in the days leading up to Halloween that it can be hard to keep their attention, so I needed some fun, new activities to keep them working and focused during our time together… Cue: Playdough monsters!

I collected some fruit loops from the preschool snack closet, grabbed beads, straws, and googly eyes from my arts/crafts drawer, and cut some bamboo skewers I randomly happened to have because I couldn’t find the pipe cleaners over lunch (and broke my scissors in the cutting process... womp womp.  At least I got enough cut for the activity, though!).

I took these materials, along with playdough, into the preschool rooms for my in-class small group language lessons, and they were a huge hit!  It kept them engaged the entire time (which isn’t an easy task!) and kept their little hands busy, as well.  We used these to target basic concepts and following directions.  They were given directions like…

-Put 2 googly eyes on your monster

-Find the long stick and put it above the eyes

-Find the short stick and put it next to the long stick

-Put 1 red fruit loop on the short stick

-Put 2 green fruit loops on the long stick

-Take 2 straws and give your monster two noses (and talked about whether our noses are above or below our eyes)

-Find another googly eye and put it below the monster’s noses

-Stack 3 purple fruit loops on top of the green ones

-Add 2 yellow fruit loops to the short stick

-Take 5 beads and make a mouth below the nose and eye

...and so on and so forth!

 

We hit on spatial concepts by using words like “above” “below” “under” “on top of” and “next to,” and hit size concepts by discriminating between the long stick and the short stick to stack the fruit loops.  This activity was great for working on colors, counting, and even some fine motor skills, too, which are all areas of need for many of my students!

Check out other fun Halloween-themed language treats from The Frenzied SLPs below!

An InLinkz Link-up