Thanksgiving Speech and Language Activities
Whether you’re working in schools, private practice, or at home, Thanksgiving-themed activities are a great way to target a variety of speech and language goals from WH- questions and vocabulary building to articulation, describing, and more. Below are some of our favorite Thanksgiving speech therapy activities, books, crafts, songs, and resources that help make our sessions both engaging and functional!
Considerations: Before I go all out and plan complete Thanksgiving activities for my caseload, I double-check that what I'm planning is actually appropriate for my clients. For example, if I have a client who does not celebrate Thanksgiving, I may skip over this theme or use a more generic theme like fall or harvests. If I have a client who has a restricted diet or is NPO, I probably won’t focus on the Thanksgiving foods but rather on some other elements of Thanksgiving, like family or football.
Thanksgiving Activities for Speech Therapy, Special Education, the Classroom, and Home
Although many of these activities are tailored toward speech therapy sessions, they can also be used across disciplines; classroom or special education teachers may read the stories, and occupational therapists may work on cutting as they make crafts or cut out flashcards!
1. Thanksgiving Books for Speech Therapy
Target seasonal vocabulary, Thanksgiving themes like gratitude and community, WH- questions, and more while reading these fun books!
- Turkey Trouble: A turkey tries to avoid the inevitable by dressing up in different costumes
- Taylor the Thankful Turkey: All about being grateful and thankful
- How to Catch a Turkey: The school needs the turkey for their play!
- Keepunumuk: Weeâchumun's Thanksgiving Story: A story about the first Thanksgiving
- Harvest Days (World of Celebrations - 3): Read about harvests all over the globe
Tip: If you are unable to access a physical copy or are seeing individuals virtually, many of these can be found on YouTube!
Find more fall-themed books here!
2. Thanksgiving Arts and Crafts for Speech Therapy
Arts and crafts can be engaging, fun, and a great way to target speech and language skills. You can target skills such as descriptions, similarities and differences, asking questions, sentence expansion, and planning and goal-setting as individuals also tap into their creative abilities.
Some favorite arts and crafts supplies include:
- Stickers and sticker scenes: make your own picture scenes
- Wooden leaves: decorate with stickers, markers, or paint
- Build Your Own Turkey: choose how you want it to look!
3. Thanksgiving Picture Scenes for Speech Therapy
Using picture scenes is an easy way to target multiple goals in individual or group sessions. They can be used to target speech sounds in functional vocabulary, practice stuttering modification or avoidance reduction strategies, and produce compound and complex sentences. Picture scenes may also be used for written assignments!
We've included a few picture scenes you can download immediately for use in your sessions! If you want to download more, as well as access hundreds more resources, join our Premium Community and get them instantly.
4. Thanksgiving and Fall Resources
In addition to the Thanksgiving picture scenes, we've created a number of other Thanksgiving resources over the years! These activities are great for answering WH- questions, reviewing parts of speech, and working with others.
- FREE Thanksgiving Mad Libs
- Fall-themed WH- question stories (freebie available as well!)
- Sensory Thanksgiving Scavenger Hunt article and resource
5. Thanksgiving Songs
I love using songs with videos in speech therapy sessions for so many reasons. They can be used to talk about what’s happening in the video, request more (or less) of the song, and use cloze phrases, e.g., “Ten little ____”
Tip: When listening to songs/watching videos on YouTube with my clients, I often go to Settings and reduce the playback speed to 0.75. A slower pace can be beneficial for learning!
Some favorite songs include:
- Thanksgiving Feast: covers different Thanksgiving foods
- Ten Little Turkeys: see what happens to them!
- Peekaboo Thank You: Cat sees all their friends
- Harvest Stew: the Cocomelon crew makes stew
- Turkey Hokey Pokey: what it sounds like - Turkey-themed Hokey Pokey!
Click play to listen to the song or on the song title above to get to YouTube!
Looking for more seasonal resources?
We have a number of fall-themed articles:
- Fall Activities for Speech Therapy
- Fall-Themed Speech Therapy Lesson Plans
- Fall Vocabulary for Speech and Language
- Pumpkin Decorating Speech and Language Activities
This post contains some affiliate links and we are (slightly) compensated if you use them, but all opinions are our own. We appreciate the support!
