Fun Fall-Themed Articulation Ideas

                            

What is not to love about fall?  I love decorating my home, both inside and outside for fall and Halloween and I also decorate my therapy room with fall items!  I'm teaming up with the Frenzied SLP's this week to share our favorite fall therapy ideas.  I decided to do my blog piece about fall articulation ideas with (mostly) things you can find around your house...especially if you have young kiddos at home and/or like to decorate for fall, like me!

1.  Plastic pumpkin bucket 

Here's my first fall/Halloween item: the pumpkin candy carrier.  This is a leftover from when my girls were younger and like many things, it made it's way from my house to my therapy room.  I have found so many uses for this jack o'lantern.  My favorite activities are to play "Feed the pumpkin."  I tell my students that "Jack" only eats items that start with the "k" sound and we say the name of the picture on the card and decide if it starts with our target sound.  If it does, we feet it to Jack as shown on the left.  I always have the corresponding letter visible when I work on articulation to help kiddoes strengthen their sound/letter skills!

A variation (shown on the right) is to feed Jack different letters and sneak some letter identification work in too!

2.  Small Halloween buckets from Target (dollar section)

What would we do without Target?  These buckets were each one dollar.  We use them to sort words that start with different sounds.  It helps my students hone their listening and auditory discrimination skills while they are practicing their target sounds or working on specific phonological patterns.  Again, I always have the corresponding letters out for my articulation activities!!

3.  Plastic Acorns!
What is it about acorns that our students love?  I bought these at Michaels years ago and I use them for fall decorating at home.  Of course, a small bag of them also made it to my therapy room!  Every time a child says their target sound, they earn an acorn.  At the end of the session they get to feed the acorns to my plush squirrel.  It's a great way to integrate counting activities into your session too.  I tell my students, "when you have 5 acorns, you can feed them to the squirrel."

4.  What's under the gourds?  

Do you decorate with gourds?  Bring them to school! Hide your target cards under the gourds and give your students directions, such as "What's under the yellow bumpy gourd?"  They check under it and tell you the name of the card!  I love this activity because I can work in so many language goals too: following directions, spatial concepts, descriptive language, sorting etc.  Gourds are great items to bring in for those students of yours that have sensory difficulties too!

5.  Rake the cards

Use a toy plastic rake or see what you have in your garage, like I did!  Have kids rake up the cards and tell you the names of them.  You can also attach the cards to real or artificial leaves with a paper clip.  Again, lots of ways to work in your language goals here too!  Work on present tense verbs (raking), pronouns (He/she is raking) and counting (count the number of cards or leaves that you raked up).

                                      6.  Feed the Squirrel!

This is an open-ended speech activity from my  Fall Speech, language and literacy packet.  The kids love feeding "Nuts the Squirrel" as they practice their sounds.  I keep this in my therapy bag during the fall as many of my students love it.  You might also be interested in this fall money-saving bundle in my store that includes 3 great fall products:  Fall Speech and Language Bundle.

7.  A Halloween Articulation Freebie!

I made this "trick or treat" visual for my students.  So many struggle with saying the sounds in the words, "trick or treat," and hey, I don't want them to lose out on any Halloween fun because of speech difficulties.  Check it out:

If interested, you can download it here!

Enjoy the fall weather wherever you are and thanks for stopping by my blog.  Be sure to check out the other SLP's blog posts in this series too at Fun Fall-themed articulation ideas!

                                                                      Donna