ClearlySpeaking Therapy

Fall is a fun time of year! We have some ideas to keep your little ones learning and having fun this season.

1. Read stories to your child!
The following are great Fall and Halloween books: Big Pumpkin, The Little Old Lady Who was Not Afraid of Anything, Clifford’s First Halloween, The Biggest Leaf Pile, Five Little Pumpkins, The Runaway Pumpkin, It’s Pumpkin Time, The Witch on a Windy Night, and The Falling Leaves. This is an example of activities you can do with Big Pumpkin. You can use these activities for any book!

Big Pumpkin
In this story, the witch wants to bake a pumpkin pie so she plants a pumpkin seed. The pumpkin grows so big that when she wants to take it off the vine she can’t. The ghost, vampire, and mummy try to help but none are strong enough. Then the bat has an idea. He’s not strong enough to pull it alone, so he suggests that they all they together, and SNAP! Off the pumpkin rolls. The witch makes her pumpkin pie and shares it with everybody who helped. She then plants another pumpkin seed for next year.

 Talk about things that grow from seeds.
 Shop for the ingredients and bake a pumpkin pie together.
 Label the pictures in the story.
 Work on the story vocabulary (e.g. pumpkin seed, big, pulled, tugged, witch, ghost, vampire, mummy, bat, planted, grew, strong). If your child does not know the meaning of the word, have him/her look it up in the dictionary.
 Take turns making sentences with one, two, or three of the vocabulary words.
 Find words in the story that have the sound/s that your child is practicing. Have him/her practice these words.
 Talk about what happened in the beginning, middle, end of the story
 List the characters. Describe each with at least two adjectives.
 Find five action words in the story and create sentences with those words.
 Pretend you are a character in the story. Describe how you feel about the events in the story.
 Draw a picture about a place in the story. Describe your picture.

2. Engage in sequencing activities!
 Make a pumpkin pie
 Make apple pie
 Talk about the steps in growing a pumpkin
 Make applesauce
 Toast pumpkin seeds

3. Work on prepositions!
Take your children outside and look for leaves. Talk about where you found the leaves… e.g. under a tree, on the grass, under the leaf pile, next to the house.

4. Links for Language Activities
 Click on this link and print off these pictures to work on descriptive language- talk about color, shape, size, texture, category, etc. http://www.speakingofspeech.com/uploads/Fallthemevocab.pdf

 Click on this link to talk about senses. What do you see, hear, smell, touch on Halloween or in the Fall? http://www.speakingofspeech.com/uploads/halloween_Senses.pdf

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 4th, 2009 at 4:36 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.