"Cheep" & Easy Easter Ideas for Speech Therapy

It's hard to believe that Easter is just a few weeks away when you just got 10 inches of snow dumped on your front lawn.  Easter egg hunts aren't very much fun when you risk losing fingers from frost bite.  I've been busy packing to get ready for our family trip to Disney World to celebrate my mother-in-law's 70th birthday.  I spent today pulling out some of the activities I did last year since I only have four more days of work until vacation!

FOAM EGG PUZZLES:  

I found these foam egg puzzles last year at Michaels.  They are great for a quick activity.  I made them up for a variety of different activities:  

1.  Defining vocabulary by stating: Category + function + description.  I use this in conjunction with my EET strand.  I also made an definition cue card to show them how to define the word (ex. A _______ is a type of _________ that you can _________.  It is _____________.)  I sent this home with some pictures of Easter objects for home practice.  

2.  Some of my clients with pragmatic language challenges were working on different levels of emotions.  We wrote a small, regular and big emotion on the front of the egg.  On the back of each piece we wrote an example of when we felt that way.  

3.  Articulation Practice.  I sent my articulation clients home with eggs containing their target sounds or sentences containing their target sounds.  

EASTER EGG HUNTS: 

These are some of my favorite things to do.  I don't think I'm breaking any ground by suggesting that you try an Easter egg hunt in therapy.  But these were made for the lazy speech therapist.  I print off a worksheet or articulation pictures, cut them out-put them in the egg and hide them.  If I'm feeling nice I might add some candy to the egg.  I LOVE that they have character eggs now-it makes it easier to do these scavenger hunts year round.  Working on /s/ blends?  I'll grab my Sponge Bob and Spiderman eggs and hide some pictures.  I just picked up some R2D2 and Ninja Turtle ones to use with some of my /r/ kids.  Here are some other ideas for Easter Egg hunts: 

Social Language/Inferencing:  

Now that I have all of these character heads, I thought they could be a fun way to work on the idea that people have different thoughts.  We start by working on object riddles.  I write out the answer and put it in the character's head.  So for example, if the answer is "apple", I put that in a Batman egg.  Then I say something like, "Batman is thinking about a fruit that is red, grows on trees and has seeds."  The child guesses and we look inside Batman's head to see if they guessed it.  I will use pictures for non-readers.  

We expand this to social inferencing to work on theory of mind.  Write the answer and put it in the egg head.  A super simple problem would be: Batman sees Joker making fun of Robin.  What does Batman think about Joker.  

Visual Referencing:  I work on visual scavenger hunts a lot with my students with nonverbal language disorders.  I'm always surprised by how difficult this can be for some of them.  We play this game 2 ways.  First, I hide eggs with treats/candy.  They get ONE chance to try to find the egg that I am thinking of.  If they open the wrong egg, I get to keep the prize.  They need to watch my eyes to see where I am looking.  They also can check in with me, and I will shake my head yes/no to let them know if they are going to pick the correct egg.  

Describing Skills:  For this activity I have the child hide the Eggs while I wait outside the room or close my eyes.  In a group, you could have each child hide 2-3 eggs.  Then they need to give you clues to figure out where they hid their egg.  For older students, I use some "hard-to-find" eggs that include suction cups on the eggs to place them up high.  

What are you doing for Easter?  Check back this week because I've got a few more Easter surprises up my sleeve-including an Easter vocabulary freebie AND a fun new game from the dollar store.  And I'm coming up on a pretty big milestone-I'm thinking a party might be a good way to celebrate it.