Thanksgiving Speech and Language Activities
Thanksgiving is probably my favorite holiday. I love the food, the family and friends, the football, and yes, even the occasional 5K. I also love incorporating Thanksgiving activities into speech and language sessions in the week or two leading up to the holiday!
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 Special Education, the Classroom, and Home
Although many of these activities are tailored toward speech therapy sessions, many of these activities can 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!
Speech and Language Skills to Target
Skill areas you can target while incorporating the Thanksgiving theme:
- Categories: sorting food and non-food items, sorting dinner and dessert items
- Requesting: requesting different Thanksgiving-related objects
- Describing: describing a Thanksgiving table
- Articulation: finding target speech sounds in Thanksgiving vocabulary (e.g. pumpkin and turkey for medial /k/)
- Pronouns: producing phrases such as, “I eat,” “they watch,” “she cooks,” “we talk,” etc.
- Verbs: targeting action words like, eat, cook, clean, cut, shop, and watch
- WH- questions: answering/asking Thanksgiving-related questions, e.g. “WHERE do you go?” “WHO do you see?” “WHAT do you do?” “WHEN do you eat?”
Check out some of our favorite books, activities, toys, and resources for Thanksgiving in our list below.
1. Thanksgiving Books for Speech Therapy
*if you are unable to access a physical copy or are seeing individuals virtually, many of these can be found on YouTube!*
- 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
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. Working on describing, sentence expansion, and goal-setting are just some of the goals that can be incorporated into arts and crafts activities in speech therapy.
Some favorite arts and crafts supplies include:
- Stickers: make your own picture scenes
- Wooden leaves: decorate with stickers, markers, or paint
- Build Your Own Turkey: choose how you want it to look!
- Thanksgiving sticker scene: a fun way to create your own scene
3. Thanksgiving Picture Scenes for Speech Therapy
Picture scenes are great for targeting a variety of skills including:
- Generalizing speech sounds/working on them at the sentence level
- Practicing stuttering skills, including avoidance reduction or stuttering modification
- Learning and using new vocabulary
- Asking or answering WH- questions
In this resource, answer the questions verbally or use them as writing prompts. You can download one page for FREE. The rest are available inside our Premium Community's Resource Library.
4. Thanksgiving Resources
In addition to the Thanksgiving picture scenes, we have created a number of other Thanksgiving resources over the years! Find articles on our site and freebies in our Teachers Pay Teachers store*.
- Fall-themed WH question stories article and free worksheet; get 20 stories with this resource!
- Fall Fun Bingo article and 3 unique Bingo boards
- Sensory Thanksgiving Scavenger Hunt article and resource
- Thanksgiving Flashcards article and cards
- Thanksgiving Mad Libs
All resources are also included in the Premium Resource Library!
Find these resources inside our Premium Community or Teachers Pay Teachers store!
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 going on in the video, request more (or less) of the song, and use cloze phrases, e.g., “Ten little ____”
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!
More Engaging and Effective Speech and Language Resources
Don't forget - you can access the ENTIRE Thanksgiving picture scenes resource, plus HUNDREDS of other resources, when you become a Premium Community member.
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