Autumn as inspiration for activities
Summer is ending and next week is the beginning of Autumn, which brings us many opportunities to explore regarding speech and language with children. The use of Autumn-related elements (or any other seasonal element) is extremely helpful to integrate children towards a common topic, even improving knowledge regarding scientific facts such as how animals and plants behave according to each season, understanding about weather variation, common holidays related to each season etc.
We have listed for you some interesting activities to stimulate speech and language:
- Where is the fallen leaf? Just hide a dry leaf (or fake leaf) in the room. The child must make questions in order to locate it, exploring prepositions, nouns and adjectives, such as “Is the leaf behind a white object?”, “Is the leaf near small puzzle pieces?” etc.
- Writing about Autumn. A new season is an amazing opportunity to enrich the vocabulary. Instruct the child to make a short text about Autumn, explaining about the season and its main elements. Encourage the use of keywords including some nouns (leaf, rake, tree, branch, bird, stick, pile), verbs (to rake, to jump, to throw, to climb) and adjectives (colour words, dry, rough, fragile).
- When the Leaf Blew In. This fun activity is based in stimulating the child to continue a story from some prompts provided by the ebook. It is extremely useful to help with cause and effect, expansion of vocabulary for verbs and verbal tenses (especially past tense), expansion of vocabulary for words related with nature and farms, and storytelling or event sequencing. You can see and download the ebook by clicking here.
There are a lot of other possible activities which can help children develop their speech and language skills. Do you use other activities and strategies to explore Autumn in your therapy sessions and classes?
Because you can.
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