It’s that spooky time of year again and everyone is getting excited to get dressed up and go Trick or Treating. At the end of the night however, there is always the dilemma of what to do with all the extra candy to avoid the sugar highs and sore bellies. So why not use them for Speech therapy activities!
Here are a few fun Halloween activities that you can do with some of your Halloween items:
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Halloween celebrity heads:
This task is great for working with school aged children that have difficulty with language description. Before everyone gets dressed up to go out in their ghoulish costumes, each person will take turns at describing their costume until someone in the group can guess who or what they are going as. The person is not allowed to say the name of their character so they are required to use descriptions such as colour, shape, etc. e.g. “I’m orange, round and I am a food”.
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Candy Categories:
This task is great for children who are working on semantic relationships and categorising. At the end of the night everyone empties out their treat bags and can work either in groups or pairs. Each child in the group or pair will take turns at grouping the candy based on a feature such as colour, shape etc. Once the child has finished sorting the candy, the partner or other members in the group must name a category title for each group such as ‘warheads’ and describe why all the items in that group belong together e.g. ‘They are all sour lollies’.
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Spooky Speech Sounds:
Speech sounds for children working on generalisation into conversation can always be incorporated into themed discussions. For example at the end of the night you can sort the remaining candy to be eaten at a later date and talk about which lollies will be eaten when. This means you can target any sound at generalisation and keep an ear out for that sound e.g. if you are working on ‘s’, a sentence such as “I will eat the swirly lollies on Sunday” will elicit those ‘s’ sounds that you are listening out for.
For more information on this topic or any speech related fields, contact the ENT Clinic on 1300 123 368 and make an appointment with our Speech Pathologist Ashleigh Fattah.
