Valentine’s Day Speech Therapy Ideas | Speech Therapy...

blog Pratiksha Gupta February 14, 2019

8 Lovely Valentine’s Day Speech Therapy Ideas

Valentine’s Day can be a fun occasion to fit into your Speech Therapy schedule. Kids love to try new activities which can be woven around their goals. Here are some cute ideas that can be taken up in the therapy sessions by professionals or by parents at home!

Cookie Cutter Heart – Grammar/Language Goals

Singular/Plural : Take contrasting picture cards of singular/plural items. Place the cookie cutter on the single item or the plural items and ask the child to make a sentence.

Pronouns ( He/She) : Use dolls – one girl and one boy ( Pic attached for reference). Place the heart cookie cutter on the girl and ask the child to make a sentence using the correct grammatical maker. Next, place the heart on the boy and initiate correct usage of the pronoun.

Listening Game : Give the cookie cutter to the child and reverse the above activities and turn them into a listening game. Ask the child to place the heart cookie cutter on the correct figure/picture. Some examples :
- She is going to the market
- He is going to eat breakfast
- This bag belongs to her
- This is his apple.
Vegetable/Fruit Sorting : Give a bowl mixed with fruits and vegetables and allow the child to categorise and sort. Once done you can peel the fruits and veggies, and cut hearty shapes with the cutter. Kids will love this activity!

2. Sentence making with candies

Take some candies and write different numbers ( 2-7) on them with a permanent marker. Put all of them in a small bag and let the fun begin. On each turn the player should pull out a candy from the bag, make a sentence with the number of words written on the candy. The child gets to eat the candy if he succeeds in correctly stringing the target number of words in the sentence! This game is great for building sentence length and social skills too.

Hearty Caterpillar ( Articulation practice) : Draw various colour hearts and stick pictures of your target sounds of words on them. You can also write any speech sounds on the hearts that you are working on. Allow the child to make a caterpillar out of these hearts. The child gets to stick one heart for each correct utterance of the target word/sound. You can even notch up the difficulty level by asking the child to produce the target work 5 times to earn one heart!

Valentines Day Cards

Create easy to do Valentine’s Cards with the child. Give lots of choices in this activity. Allow the child to choose the shape/colour of the card. Give options of designs for the card. You can google some card ideas and take the child’s opinion. Making cards is also a great way to ask WH questions like What is Valentines Day? For whom should we make a card? When will we post the card etc.

Sensory Hearts

You can cut big heart shapes out of thick craft paper. Take a variety of crafty items like pom poms, sequins, stickers, bubble wrap, cotton balls, foam balls, shiny confetti, thin paper balls, tooth pic/match stick pieces, yarn or thread, cloth or felt etc. Allow the child to stick all of these items on different hearts. Describe as you go along. Talk about soft, rough, thick, fluffy, bright, shiny and other describing adjectives as you do the activity together.

Valentines Book Reading

There are many cute Valentines books in the market. You can get one even on Kindle and read it together with your child. Reading books together is a great way to introduce new vocabulary, sentence structure, language and instil imagination. To make it more engaging stick small heart stickers on a few pages before hand, and ask the child to find each of them. Find a list of lovely books in the picture attached. Below is also a video about a cute Valentine’s Day book. You can use the video by pausing at each page, reading and describing as you go along.

Cake Baking

Valentine’s Day is also a great time to bake something sweet at home. Involve your child at every step, right from breaking the eggs to icing the cupcake/cake that you have baked together. Do not worry about the mess, keep it simple and allow the child to speak back and forth with you. Ask WH questions like

Where should we break the eggs?
How does a cake taste?
What do we need to mix all the ingredients?

You can try both open ended questions ( like above) and even closed ended questions depending on the child’s language level.

Examples of closed ended questions –

Do we need eggs? ( yes/no) ,
Is it time to put the cake in the oven ( yes/no) ,
Do you want to try icing the cake ( yes/no)

You can also bake cookies/cupcakes or any other sweets and use it to enrich language in ways described above.

8. Valentine’s Dress Up

Get all the amazing costumes and make up out and have super fun. Turn this opportunity into a language rich experience, where you talk about different clothes, the colours, the sequence of dressing up, body parts, functions of body parts and more! You can also also work further by talking about how 2 costumes are different and point out 5 differences.