Hand turkeys are one of my favorite Thanksgiving speech therapy crafts. Maybe your parents have one that you made in preschool laying around:
- Trace around the child’s hand.
- Draw a beak and a waddle onto the thumb. Add two legs.
- Color the fingers orange/red or yellow and the rest of the hand brown.
I make hand turkeys with all ages-even middle school. I like them because you can teach strategies such as 5 finger retell. So even though this is a Thanksgiving activity, you can use the strategy you taught for the rest of the year.
Articulation Hand Turkeys:
Write articulation words on each finger. Finish the sentence on the thumb (ex. “tastes good.” is a fun one!
Main Idea/Details Hand Turkeys:
Read a story to your students and have them try to remember 4 details of the story. Write the main idea on the thumb of your hand.
Describing/Defining Hand Turkey:
I’ve used this to work on Thanksgiving vocabulary. Have the student write the word they are going to describe on the thumb. Write an attribute on each of the four fingers. On this example, I asked my client to provide 4 descriptors for an apple. If you use a semantic mapping strategy such as EET, you could color the different fingers based on the categories on that tool. (ex. group, function etc.).
Categorization Hand Turkey:
Write the category on the thumb and ask your students to write the category members on each finger. Or you could write the names of the category members on the fingers and ask them to fill in the category label. Make it even more difficult by having them decide which one of the four items doesn’t belong AND name the category.
WH Question Hand Turkey
I use this for story retell. Write who, what, where, when and why on each of the fingers/thumb and have the students answer these questions after reading a short story
Story Retell Hand Turkey
Another option is to use the hand turkey for story retell focusing on characters, setting, and events in the story.
QUESTION: What is your favorite Speech Therapy Thanksgiving Activity?
