We're heading into our last week before Christmas break! We're squeezing in as much Christmas-y fun as possible this week. I do have a few kids that don't celebrate Christmas and we're going to be using a mini-cookie theme instead. But here is a HUGE round-up of Christmas therapy materials for teletherapy and face-to-face!
There are so many awesome Christmas books. It's really hard to pick just a few to read over the course of a week. I try to read different ones than I have read with my groups the year before since I tend to have kids over the course of several years. These are my favorites! Little Blue Truck's Christmas is always a hit with my pre-K groups. My students with autism love the old lady series and my older kids like the "How to catch a ___" series!
I have a paper bag game, What's in Santa's Bag? that is great for mixed groups! It has printable cards for both articulation and language skills. We make the bags, cut out the cards, and take turns pulling a card from the bags. The goal is to be the first player to get all five presents out of the bag. After we play with them in therapy my kids take them home for home practice! I have alternated printing the bags on red paper or having the kids color them. I like activities where the kids have to spend some time coloring because I usually get a chance to hear some great unstructured conversational speech and note if they are using any of their carryover skills.
Next, I have a Christmas Countdown! This requires a bit of prep but the pictures on the rings contain the student's targeted speech sound. Each night they rip off a loop and practice the words. When they reach the bell it's Christmas Eve! I made these when I had a smaller caseload. Making these with 50+ kids is no easy feat so I haven't made them in a few years.
Trim the Tree! We have used these Christmas lights in a few different ways over the years. Sometimes we make a chain of lights like you see below. But we have also made a big Christmas tree out of bulletin board paper and taped all the lights from each group to decorate the tree. My kids seem to like the strings best because they can take them home. Some of my kids have made these over multiple years and get excited to add to their other strings.
Build-a-Beard! This is always the best craft to hang in the hallways. Under the cotton balls are pictures or words that focus on the skill. The kids practice and then cover it up with a cotton ball to build Santa's beard. I have a Build-A-Beard for Articulation and one for language too. So, this is easy to do with mixed groups. I just print whatever skill for each student and make sure to have lots of cotton balls from the dollar store (and liquid glue works better than glue sticks!).
Can't miss a month to break out the dot markers! In December we make a dot art Christmas tree. I usually make my example with rainbow colors so my kids tend to follow suit but they can make their "lights" any color they want. Another easy mixed group activity. Just print and go!
I found these adorable Christmas light mini-erasers this year from Oriental Trading and thought they would be fun to play with my Mini-Speech Games.
I have a Christmas No-Prep Printables file that I made when I taught 2nd grade. I obviously don't use the math printables anymore but the vocabulary cards and mini-story are great!
Since I am 100% remote this year, we have been playing some new games to learn seasonal vocabulary instead of using the vocabulary cards. My Winning Word December game is great to introduce the vocabulary at the beginning of the month and iSpy December is awesome to review at the end. They both include the same vocabulary words and center around a Christmas theme.
I just found out this year that Spot it! makes seasonal games so I had to grab the holiday version! This is so much fun in person and we've been able to play using a document camera for teletherapy too! They are also great to use to go on a "sound hunt" and see how many pictures you can find with the targeted speech sound. For my language groups, we may find the match and then hunt for pictures that fit into a given category like food or clothes or a given adjective like things that are red, round or hot. If you want to play with a whole class you could break the class into two teams. Project the two cards using the Smartboard or document camera. Have one player from each team come up to play at a time. Whichever player finds the match first wins a point for their team and the first team to 10 points wins! There are so many ways to play!
I will definitely be using lots of Boom Cards next week. These two will be used the most, Trim the Tree and Boom Book: Tree Trimming.
This Boom Book is in my bundle or available separately. It has a short story about trimming the Christmas tree with comprehension questions, sequencing, and retelling activities too. I will use this mainly with my language groups.
Trim the Tree is an articulation activity where the kids have to decorate their tree with only pictures that contain their speech sound.
And last but not least, I have two FREE boom card decks for this week too! Pick a Present is a naming/inferencing boom deck and Make Your Own Cookies is an open-ended deck where kids can decorate cookies (great to work on giving effective directions or spatial concepts). The cookie deck isn't Christmas specific so it could also be used for any kiddos who don't celebrate Christmas. I will have a mini-cookie theme going during next week too for my kids who don't celebrate Christmas.
So many fun and Christmas-y activities! It will be hard to stick to just the digital activities this year but we'll be sure to get out the paper materials next year!
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