Halloween Paper Craftivities: Rerun

Do you come up with new Holiday activities or do you tend to have your same Holiday activities that you use year after year?  I definitely have some of my favorite activities that I use.  I used to LOVE to scrapbook.  I'd go on Scrapbooking weekends, or all night Scrapathons.  I have a whole bunch of beautiful scrapbooks that I created.  Then I had a kid and stopped.  Does that make me a horrible mom?  I think you are supposed to at least shower your first kid with beautiful scrapbooks and baby books, right?  Not me.  Apparently I only like to scrapbook kegger parties and exotic vacations.  

But what do you do with your extra scrapbook supplies that you've hoarded over the years?  I try to use them up in Speech therapy crafts.  (the exotic vacation supplies at least.)  Here is a rerun of a post I did last year for 2 Paper crafts that I make each year:

I was at Archivers (a scrapbook store) a few years ago (when I still had time to scrapbook.)  They have die cut machines which allow you to punch shapes out of scrabooking paper.  One of the punches was of a fence and the other one I made was of a house with a door that you can open.

Last week, we used these shapes to make Halloween paper crafts, focusing on following directions, stating directions, requesting supplies, and articulation/intelligibility.

1.  Five Little Pumpkins:
















I glued the "gate" onto blue paper and also cut out the 5 little pumpkins rhyme using a cloud shape before the therapy session.  In the past, I've used different stickers to make the pumpkins. Last year I found a really cool pumpkin hole puncher on clearance that included 3 different stamps to decorate the pumpkins.  Here is how I used it in therapy:

1.  Requesting: punch out the pumpkin, I do it, you do it, I want the pumpkin stamp, (ready, set...) GO.
2.  Labeling locations: Put the pumpkin on the fence, under the moon, next to the cloud etc.
3.  Following directions (for this I hid the five pumpkins)  The child had to find the pumpkins I hid (ex. find the pumpkin under your chair) and then bring them back to glue onto the gate.
4.  /s/ Blends: stamp, stick, sticky, Spooky, scary,
5.  Emotions: I had my social skills kids work on drawing different emotions on the pumpkins
6.  Articulation homework:  After we were finished, I highlighted all of the sounds/words I wanted the parents to work on in the poem.

2.  Spooky House
I used the house die cut and punched out a bunch of houses onto black scrapbooking paper.  I took pictures of some of the kids making scared faces (always get consent for photos first) and then printed them off using the contact sheet portion.  It worked better to print the pictures off on photo paper, regular copy paper printed too dark.  I also wished I'd taken a picture of the whole child and printed it off even smaller so that their whole body fit in the door.

I put the child behind the door and then glued everything onto the blue paper.   Then the child got to add the stickers to the picture.
1. Emotions:  We practiced making scary faces and talked about what different parts of our face do when we are scared.  We also talked about strategies for what to do when things are scary.
2.  Articulation:   Kid'n'Kaboodle had a variety of fingerplays and I varied the poem based on what sounds I was working on with the child.
3.  Vocabulary: I didn't have a lot of stickers, but it was also a good activity for naming or requesting.
4.  Role playing: We also talked about how to go trick or treating. We could practice knocking on the door, opening it, saying trick or treat and then getting candy.

A gazillion Ghoulish Games and Apps

I was looking for an app similar to a Toca Boca app but that practiced trick or treating skills.  You could choose the costume and then go up to the door, say trick or treat and get a piece of candy.  Maybe you could pick the type of candy (good or bad like real eyeballs.)  I haven't found any apps that address that directly.  Here are some of the apps that I did find and how I might use them in therapy.

Mask Doodle App: Shoe the Goose.  I love to use cookie doodle to target actions and prepositions during therapy sessions.  This app allows you to decorate different masks (animals, monsters, half masks, robots, or people)  This is a great app to focus on directions such as put in/on, as well as focusing on colors or sizes.  You can create masks pretty quickly.  The best thing is that you can print out the mask and then work on role plays or just send it home.

Clicky Sticky Halloween App.  The Clicky Sticky apps are probably the best sticker book app on the market.  You can choose between different scenes including: pumpkin decorating, costumes, haunted houses and Halloween candy.  I usually use these apps to focus on naming objects/actions as well as prepositions.  Place the items on the scene and then press play to watch them move.  You can also work on predicting-"What do you think the spider will do/I think he will spin a web."

Mash-o-Ween.  I love MASH games for categorization and vocabulary generation.  This download focuses on naming different costumes, candies, activities you can do as well as people in your environment.  Draw a spiral and the app procedeeds to eliminate answers until your future is apparent.  This is a great way to focus on narratives as well as some predicting skills (what do you think will happen if I go to McDonalds in my cow costume.)

Halloween jokes.  This FREE download contains written jokes as well as some photo jokes and prank videos.  I tend to use the written portion most frequently to focus on multiple meanings and explaining humor.  The jokes are very basic (ex. what does a ghost put on his cereal in the morning?)  Booberries and boonanas.

Millie's tricks Volume 1 and 2.  These start with knocking on a door and then a wheel spins to see if you get a trick or treat.  Afterwards an adorable video focusing on a dog completing a similar activity is shown.  I use this a lot for sentence generation tasks.

Peek-a-boo Trick or Treat. I have LOVED Ed Emberly's books since I was little.  I still have old journals where I tried to use his shape based approach to draw different objects.  This is combines his artwork with the idea of Peekaboo Farm.  The door is knocking, you answer it and different Halloween characters appear.  This would be SUPER awesome if you were inside answering the door vs. outside.

 

Little Monster's Dentist.  This is a fun app for role play activities and discussing good dental hygiene with monsters.  I think there are better dentist apps out there but this was FREE so it's worth it to try it out.  

Halloween for Kids:  This FREE app just has slide shows of different pictures of Halloween events and items.  It's a nice one to use for describing and sentence structures.  

Spooky Differences.  Identify the differences between 2 pictures.  Some of the differences are pretty subtle.  I like to use these apps to work on comparison statements (Ex. in this picture there are three bats but in this picture there are only two.)

What was I scared of.  I LOVED reading this app with my son.  There is spooky music and a pair of "empty pants" which makes it a little silly while being a little scary.

Spooky House:  This is basically a cause and effect app that allows you to touch different parts of the screen to make things spooky things happen.  The full version contains 2 parts of the house and the free version is just on the outside.  If they had more inside options, I'd definitely recommend it.  Definitely take the time to check out the FREE version though.

Adapted Book, 5 Pumpkins.  I love this rhyme.  This version includes sign language for each version.

This is My Story.....and I'm sticking to it.  This app focuses on simple sentence structures.  You pick a "topic" and then choose different stickers to create a very simple story by changing one word per sentence.  For example, you could make your story about the ghost and then fill in the blank for sentences like, "The ghost said hello to ....."  

Magic Halloween Iblower.  I like apps for younger or more severely involved students which just provide different objects when you touch the screen.  With this app, touching the screen causes different Halloween objects to appear.  I use these for describing and naming.  I got this when it was free and like it.  I probably wouldn't spend money on it as there isn't any sound or sound effects with the app.  

Spooky Dice:  This was created by the people who came up with Story Dice.  You have the option to role 3 dice to determine character, plot and setting ideas.  Fun to work on sentence generation or shorter paragraph generation.

The Scariest Halloween Story Ever.  This is a fun interactive book which keeps trying to get the reader to stop reading because it is too scary.

Guess Who: Halloween.  I love the Guess who games.  I just bought this one so haven't had a lot of time to play around with it.

Mask Mania.  Why print out a mask when you can take a picture and put on virtual mask on your photo.  I wrote about this app last year.  So much fun for role playing and sentence structures ("I want to be, I am a "

What apps did I miss and why do you love them?

Mama-on-Days: Stepping WAY outside of my comfort zone.

Have you ever done something so crazy (to you, anyhow) that you can't believe you did it?  

Sometime last Spring, I wrote about how I was signing my mother and I up for a Girlfriend Mystery Tour.  We showed up at the meeting place on Saturday morning not knowing what we would do for the day.  It's sometimes hard for women to take the time to get together.  The tours were started as a way for women to take time to have a completely fun day where they didn't need to plan anything.  All they had to do was show up.

Our first stop was at fancy restaurant for brunch.  The restaurant was beautiful-and the hotel was amazing.  They just opened this summer near the Mall of America (largest mall in the US for you non MN friends.)  And also where I put myself through undergraduate selling fried chicken and ice cream-while wearing a green camp shirt, kerchief, and socks pulled up to my knees with black shoes.  Sexy. I really need to remember that when I think my job is tough now!  So far, so good.

Stop #2: A showroom for Quartz countertops.
I was a little skeptical when we stopped here-I could use some new counter tops but really?  Then they poured a glass of wine and everything seemed fine.  The showroom was beautiful, I learned that they were a local company and all of the products are made here in Minnesota.  They had two women give inspirational speeches and then let us do a little jewelry shopping.

Stop #3:  Improve Comedy Club:  I have forgotten how much fun it was to go to a comedy club.  So funny.  We are LOVING this girlfriend tour-everyone is so friendly and fun.

Stop #4:  Trapeze company.   Yes.  I said, we stopped at a trapeze company.  Never, in one million years did I think that this GF tour would involve trapeze swinging. First there was a brief performance-and then they opened it up to the group to try trapeze swinging.

That's pretty high up in the air.  

 I have a pretty intense fear of heights which I try to ignore.  One of my grad school placements had a day where they put us on a Ropes course.  Have you done one of these?  I became petrified on the rope ladder for the first obstacle.  I froze for about 45 minutes halfway up the ladder.  I don't know that I really ever realized that I was scared-I just thought I wasn't strong enough to climb the ladder.  I only realized when both my arms and legs were covered in 2 giant 5 inch bruises how scared I had been.  

Here's the funny-or sad thing-I don't think I would have ever considered it normally.  But then I thought it would be a great thing to post a picture of myself hanging from the practice swing (low to the ground) since I knew I would be writing about this day.  So I convinced my mom to come with me to take the picture.  But then I thought, what if i could "conquer my fear" and just climb up the freakishly narrow ladder and just swing a couple of times.  So that's what I did.

Notice me climbing up the ridiculously long ladder and then joking with the shirtless trapeze artist.  The hard part was probably climbing the ladder-because I knew once I was up there I wasn't going to climb back down that ladder.  When he said "up" I was able to jump forward and swing.  Probably not too gracefully as I was screaming at the top of my lungs.  But at least I'll know where those vocal nodules came from.  

The best part was that my mom, who is 75, also did it.  She was the oldest person to try this and everyone was so excited.  She got to sign the wall and they took her photo too.  I love my mom!

Stop #5:  After my stomach stopped heaving, I was really hoping that we would stop for some type of liquid refreshment.  But it ended up being better: we stopped at the Izzy's ice cream location.  If you come to MN-you need to try it-plus they give you a little extra Izzy scoop on top so you can try 2 different flavors.  

Last Stop:  Dinner at a Meditteranean restaurant with belly dancing, a celebrity impersonator, and a horn player for dinner music.  Which reminded me that time moves muuuuuch more slooooooooowly when a horn player is plaaaaaaaaaaaaaying a Keeeeeeeennnnnnnny G tune in front of your face.  Ack. So awkward.  

That was my Girlfriend tour-it was amazing.  Who's up for an SLP Internet Girlfriends tour next year?

My Favorite Halloween Books for Speech Therapy

Have I mentioned that I live in the Halloween Capitol of the World?  I love Halloween and am lucky enough to be able to include Halloween lessons in my Speech therapy sessions.  I do make sure I check with individual parents first however.  Last year I stocked up on some Halloween titles.  

Here are some of my favorites:  

Boo Bunny: 

by Kathryn O. Galbraith:  

This is a pretty simple book but great for little ones who are working on imitating environmental sounds.  It's also great for working on rounded vowels.

Is That You, Wolf?

by Steven Cox:

I love pop up books-Each page requires you to put your hand in a pocket and feel something to see if it is the wolf.  This is a great book for working on adjectives. Plus there is a scary surprise at the end.  (I made the biscuit jump with this one...insert evil mom laughter here.)  

Goodnight Goon
by Michael Rex
After reading Goodnight Moon a gazillion times, I thought this was a funny parody.  Great for working on rhyming and short sentence imitation.

In the Haunted House
by Eve Bunting
This is a classic book.  I like that it seems kind of creepy as you read it and the surprise at the end.

Halloween Good Night by Doug Cushman.
This is a cute book where you talk about how you would tell different Halloween characters "Good night."  It uses a lot of "If you were" sentence structures.

Haunted House by Jan Pienkowski
Have I mentioned that I LOVE pop up books.  This is a classic pop up book where you open flaps and pull and push the flaps to make different actions happen.  Great for working on future and past tense forms: What will octopus do?  What did the octopus do?  Plus you open a toilet seat lid to find an animal inside.  Bathroom humor is ALWAYS hilarious.

Inside a House that is Haunted
By Alyssa Satin Capucilli
A great repetitive line book along the lines of There was an old lady who swallowed a ..... This is a great one to add actions to during group reading.

Mommy?  By Maurice Sendak
This is an amazing pop up book where the boy tries to find his mommy.  On each page, he simply says, "Mommy?" to different monsters.  Would be good to work on early CVCV imitation, question intonation and early reasoning skills (Do you think that is his mommy?)

The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything.  

by Linda Williams

Another repetitive line book-I use this to work on sound imitation, auditory memory and short sentence repetition.  This is another fun one to use with actions.  

Crankenstein

by Samantha Berger

I just ordered this one from Scholastic through my son's preschool (I always order a gazillion books-love, love, love Scholastic.)  The premise of a boy who turns into the monster Crankenstein when he doesn't get what he wants sounded perfect for some of my social thinking students.  I'll let you know once I get it.  

Lazy Speech Therapist: Who has the biggest pile?

I'm almost ashamed to post this one.

Do you ever wonder if every speech blogger's sessions are filled with fantastically creative activities?  I can't speak for everyone, but I have to admit that there are a lot of sessions where I am TOO lazy to think of creative activities or pick out a game during therapy.  I just want to sit in my seat and do picture cards with my kids on lazy days.  I rely on my sparkling personality to motivate the kids.  

That's where the super lazy day hints come in handy.  I've used funny voices, just worn a pair of silly glasses or changed all the names in sentences to my client's name.  We've gone through card decks and just thrown them on the floor as we were done saying them.  That's not that lazy, really, since you have to bend over to pick them up.  Although the game, let's see how many you can pick up or how fast you can pick up cards is a good game too.  

This week I played a rousing game of who has the taller pile.  My client got to keep cards that they said correctly.  Cards they missed I got.  In a group, you could have other students say the correct answer to win the pile.  At the end, they can see who has the higher pile.  I probably didn't need to write the directions-I know you all could have figured this out easily.  

I lost.  

Make your own: Superhero Card eaters

Who knew that something so easy as can with a hole in it would be motivating in Speech Therapy?

I've used Super Duper's animal buddies before when I am doing drill work.  It's pretty fun for my younger kids.  There are four animals on the box and you can feed the animals their favorite foods.

It's especially hilarious if the animals hate it and make horrible retching sounds if you feed them the wrong foods.

I wanted something for my older clients.  The Occupational therapists that I work with use coffee containers with an X cut out on the top and have their clients work on finger strengthening by pushing pom pom balls through the lid.  I wanted to use something like that but with a design, which is how I came up with Superhero card eaters:

Clip art by ReviDevi

MATERIALS:

• Empty Can with Lid (I chose Pringles because they are delicious and small enough to store easily-but a coffee can might work better since you could put larger articulation cards in the top.  
• Duck Tape
• Clip art with Superhero or other design
• Power point or other graphics software
• Sticker Paper 

STEP ONE:  Eat pringles.  I love pringles.  I was planning to make 3 or 4 different cans for this post, but my husband didn't realize that I wanted to save the empty cans we ate during a road trip.  *sigh*  I guess I'll have to eat more pringles.  

STEP TWO:  Cover can in Duck tape.  I love that there are so many different kinds of Duck tape-I saw Justin Bieber tape on clearance a few weeks ago.  I didn't get it but wished I had as I have several Belieber's on my caseload.  

STEP THREE:  Create Super hero Head.   Create circles the size of your can in Power point or another graphic's  program.

You can download these circles I made for the smaller Pringles can HERE.

I purchased some Super hero clip art with big heads from ReviDevi on Etsy.  I added the clip art in Power point and resized it until the head was in the middle of the picture.  I printed it off on sticker paper.  Due to copyright and trademark laws, I don't use these images in products that I sell.  

Clip art by ReviDevi

STEP FOUR: Cut out Superhero head and attach it to the lid.  

Clip art by ReviDevi

The pringle lids were a little small (and the mouth in the artwork was at the bottom.)  My next ones I make, I would center the mouth more towards the middle or pick different clipart.  But it works pretty good for putting small tokens or money in them.  

Clip art by ReviDevi 

Clip art by ReviDevi

How have you used old cans in therapy?  I'd love to hear about it.  If you found this post helpful, please consider sharing on Pinterest or Facebook by clicking on the buttons below.