“Cheep” & Easy Easter Ideas for Speech Therapy

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.  

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: 

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.