A Treat of Halloween-Themed Language Tricks & Activities for SLPs From: The Frenzied SLPs

It's time for the next installment of the Frenzied SLPs! This week the Frenzied SLPs are highlighting Halloween-themed language activities sure to keep your little ghosts and goblins motivated and happy (and some of the larger ones as well) and make your planning a little bit easier.

As I have stated often, "I love to capitalize on a theme!" It makes therapy planning a cinch. Holidays are a fabulous way to design activities around a theme. Here is a sampling of what will be happening in our speech room for the next couple of weeks.

On one of my recent trips to Walmart for ink, card stock, etc. I perused the holiday storybook display. Walmart always has a nice collection of holiday storybooks and I found a really cute book that I thought would make a wonderful addition to my library; Monster Needs a Costume.  I (like many) find books to be a great resource for language therapy. There is a wealth of book companions on TpT for most any popular book, but I couldn't find one for this particular book, so I made a little something that would meet my needs. You can pick it up here.

Defining and describing is a crucial skill in schools and one that our speech-language impaired students struggle with. Over the years I have used a variety of materials to teach describing, but the procedure has always been the same; talk about attributes, characteristics, functions, parts, location, category, etc. The Expanding Expression Tool has put it all in one place and format. My students love my "describing hop" activities for learning about creating definitions. When playing Halloween Hop, students either use wind-up eyes or Halloween hopping frogs to move on the board. They describe the picture with the corresponding attribute they land on.

Play-doh smashing has been all the rage! Far be it from me to miss a trend, so we started smashing synonyms. Prior to smashing we played memory and go fish to learn the synonym pairs.

In order to help my older students with listening comprehension, inferencing, problem solving, vocabulary, fact vs. fiction, context clues and more we went to the Internet. Snopes.com has some fairly creepy (and not so creepy) urban legends that are appropriate for middle school students.
Here are a few we've been using this Halloween:
Lifesavers were created because the inventors daughter choked on a mint without a hole.
The daddy long legs spider is the most venomous in the world.
Halloween ranks second only to Christmas in retail sales.
Vacationing couple discover a body under their bed in a hotel room.

Another wonderfully creepy source for language therapy is kidzworld.com. The folks at kidzworld have compiled a nice collection of information on the legends of some truly spooky characters including werewolves, witches, mummies, and vampires. I put the information together on some cards so my students could refer to the text more easily and highlight key details and vocabulary.

What are you doing for Halloween with your language students. Please link up and share your therapy expertise.

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