Tip Tuesday Flashback: What My Clients’ Were Up to This Christmas Season!

 Here is another Tip Tuesday Flashback with some fun Holiday themed therapy activities I enjoy with my clients.  I hope you enjoy them too!  

Here are just a few of the fun Christmas themed activities my clients’ and I had fun with this holiday season.


Must Be Santa:
Guess what my kids got to do with a bag of cotton balls and some petroleum jelly?  Make Ms. Maria into SANTA!!!!

We had so much fun!  Each correct sound production, or correct response to various language activities equaled 1 cotton ball placed ANYWHERE they wanted on my face!  Here are some pics of our fun!!!!  What do you think?








 


I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of liking this new look!!! You think I can rock the cotton ball Santa beard or what?


Christmas Tree BASH UP:
I have a few boys that just LOVE their cars.  So I modified the articulation cups game that has been floating around the internet for some time now.  

I took 10 small Dixie cups, placed articulation or language stimulus cards on top.  For each correct response or production, my client got to build a “TREE” one cup at a time!

Here is a picture of one of my client’s picking up an articulation stimulus card and practicing saying it correctly BEFORE he obtained his cup.



Here’s a picture of our “tree” in the process of being built!



 Once the tree was complete, my clients’ would choose which car he wanted to “bash up the tree” by driving into the cups and knocking them down.  


Tip:  Stick to doing this on the floor…the cups fly everywhere and it’s so fun for the kids to see where they go (which we can then use to stimulate language by asking “where”?s) and gathering them up for another round of Christmas Tree Bash Up! Looks fun right?  It really is!  PLEASE DO TRY THIS AT HOME!!! You’ll have so much fun.




Felt Christmas Tree Decoration:
I made a Christmas tree out of felt and used multi-colored buttons of various shapes and sizes to “decorate” to the tree!

My clients’ would practice a few stimulus cards and then roll the big fat red die…

…and count the number of “dots” to know how many buttons to put on their trees! 
Here’s one of our first finished trees!!!!

 

Later we made this game more difficult by sorting the buttons by shape, size and color and placed the correct buttons on the corresponding trees!  GREAT for PK kiddos learning these pre-academic skills!!!!
Christmas Tree Hop:
For this game I used some of the free materials I posted on Monday and placed target pictures next to numbered index cards.  Each student had to HOP in number order from 1-10 while practicing various stimulus cards along the way.
Below you can see the crazy path I created for the kids to travel on their way to the…. 
…Christmas tree!

By the time they reached their Christmas tree, each child got to pull an ornament out of the “Christmas box” I had and place it on the tree.  This means in order to obtain 1 Christmas ornament each child had to practice 10 DIFFERENT stimulus cards.  

 Below is a picture of one of my kiddos placing their ornament on the tree!

 

(I was able to get an average of 8-10 ornaments per session which is equal to 80-100 trials!!!!)
Parent Presents:  Christmas Ornament:
Children LOVE to GIVE to others.  What’s more fun than making a Christmas gift for mom and dad?  I found these super cute Christmas Ornaments at the $ store!  This packet comes with 2 ornaments and you assemble them with glue. 
I love this type of activity because you can work on sequencing and following directions!  And look how cute they are!!!
 For each piece of the ornament my clients’ had to practice 5 stimulus pictures…and there were at least 10 items to glue which is equivalent to at the very least 50 trials PER ORNAMENT!
And how very proud my kids were of themselves!  They now have something they can give mom and dad on Christmas day!!!!