We're back with themes this week to kick off October. In October I like to read books, play games or complete activities with a variety of fun themes. My favorite themes for October are pumpkins, spiders and bats, monsters, and Halloween. This post is all about pumpkins! Here are some of the things we will use in therapy this week!
First, I have my collection of pumpkin books! I have a variety for all ages (pre-K through middle elementary). The board books are great for my pre-K kiddos or students with limited language as they are simple and easy text. I love reading the How Many Seeds in a Pumpkin book with my 2nd-3rd graders. We can get in some inferencing, making predictions, and a little math too with that one. In face to face therapy we will also have a pumpkin to cut open and count the seeds. For every seed we count we say a word with our speech sound! 
Next, is my monthly Dot Art, this month is a pumpkin! These are great for mixed groups, I just print one page for each student in group (depending on their goal), and away we go! They also look great hanging in the hallway outside our speech room.
For my 2nd grade and up articulation groups we take the 50 trials challenge. We challenge ourselves to practice our speech sound 50 times during the session. I used to try for a 100 but when working in groups of 3-4 I found it wasn't always realistic to get to 100 and some of my kids would become frustrated, so now we try for 50. These are also great to send home for home practice.
My Mini-Eraser Games can be used with any theme and next week I will use them with my pumpkin mini-erasers from Target. You can adapt the rules of the game to play over teletherapy (assign a number to each student, roll a dice and whoever fills up their column first wins) or since they are in half-sheets, if you have only two in your group they will both fit under the Osmo as a document camera and you can play with the original rules.
This year I am excited to use the next two Boom Card activities too! This first one is called All About...Pumpkins! Similar to my All About...Apples, it has five activities to target a variety of language skills such as answering WH- questions, describing, labeling, and retelling or sequencing the life cycle of a pumpkin.
The articulation companion to All About...Pumpkins is a Boom Card deck called Pumpkin Patch! You choose a phoneme and then take turns dragging and dropping the pumpkins into the wheelbarrow. Before we drag and drop we always review the words by clicking the seed in the top right corner. We also choose a "winning word" and whoever finds the winning word, wins! This type of game is what inspired my newest Winning Word game decks!
That rounds up pumpkins! I hope you are as excited to kick off October therapy as I am!
Hi, great reading your blog
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