Whether it’s carving a jack-o-lantern for Halloween, making Thanksgiving crafts, or holiday decorations, these traditions create lasting memories.
Incorporating Speech Activities
Integrating speech and language skills while doing activities with the child can make a big difference.
For instance, decorating a pumpkin is a great activity for spending one-on-one time together, exchanging words, laughter, and smiles.
Implementing speech and language development is easy during fun family activities
Choosing a Pumpkin
Whether you are at the grocery store or your favorite pumpkin patch, there are many sizes and shapes to talk about.
This would also work with choosing a tree, fall leaves to make a wreath, or even painting a pumpkin at home. It is a great opportunity to talk about descriptive words.
The size: little, smaller, medium, bigger, huge, enormous, gigantic.
The shape: oval, square-ish, round, triangle.
The color: white, green, yellow, orange.
The texture: bumpy, smooth, cracked, dented
Action: roll, carry, lift, heavy, light
Carving And Decorating Your Pumpkin
If you will be doing most of the carving, narrate the process, this will help build and develop language. Words such as, carve, bottom, top, scrape, slimy, stringing, seeds, mouth, teeth, eyes, angry, scary, happy, or goofy.
If you plan on painting your pumpkin, you can cut up a sponge into different shapes and stamp a design, press leaves into the paint, or use non traditional colors or glow in the dark paint.
Decorate your pumpkin with glitter, stickers, make funny faces by using stickers, for jewel tone paint. Get creative, communicate with your words, eyes, and laughter
Encourage Repetition
Experts also agree that reading the same stories over and over again helps overcome language and speech issues. It helps sharpen vocabulary and sentence construction learning skills. It is also important to let your child pick out their favorite holiday book.
