Let's unwrap some festive activities that will get the little ones excited to work on their speech and language targets!
1. Deck the Halls with Vocabulary: Christmas Tree Decorating 🎄
Turn decorating the Christmas tree into a language-rich activity. Create a list of ornaments, colors, and adjectives related to the holiday season. Encourage your young decorators to describe each ornament as they hang it on the tree, building both vocabulary and sentence structure.
2. Santa's Speech and Language Workshop: Crafting Christmas Lists 📮
This activity is a fantastic opportunity to work on expressive language skills.
When writing their list incorporate their targets, whether that's breaking each item into syllables, practising your target sound or building your sentences using adjetives to describe their item. You can add these onto your PECS sentence strips too: 'I want.....'
3. Reindeer Relay Race: Following Directions 🦌
If your little one is working on following instructions or understanding concept words this is a fantastic and versatile activity. Create a reindeer-themed obstacle course and give children instructions on how to navigate it using your targets words e.g. 'under/over' or giving them an order in which to complete the obstacles.
4. Build Santa's Beard: Target words and sounds 🎅
Turn your targets words and sounds into an advent calendar! There are some fantasic templates for this available on Twinkl.com where you can add a picture each day to Santa's beard or uncover a new word/sound to target that day together. It's also a great reminder at the end of December to see all they've achieved throughout the month and re-visit these together.
5: Who am I?: Christmas Guessing Game 🤔
Use the power of description to develop their communication and inferencing skills! Use a template from Twinkl or make up your own. Take it in turns to describe a Christmas character, working on listening, describing, sentence use, sounds and understanding and use of question words! Try t include an action word to support young ones building sentences e.g. 'I have a white beard, I wear a red suit, I fly in a sleigh, Who am I?'
We hope your have lots of fun with the above activity ideas, and there are so many ways to adapt and extend these to suit the needs of your child. Let us know how you get on, and have a Very Merry Christmas! 🎄
