Halloween is a great time to engage children in speech therapy activities that are both fun and functional. Whether you’re a parent looking to practice at home or a speech-language pathologist looking for ideas for your sessions, use these Halloween games for speech therapy to help your child or client improve their communication skills.
Halloween is an excellent time to get your students excited about speech therapy. With the help of these fun activities, you can make it even more engaging, which will help you achieve better results.
- Spider Web
This activity requires a group of at least three students. One student stands in the middle of a circle and says “I am stuck in a spider web.” The rest of the students reply “You are stuck in a spider web?” The first student says “Yes I am” and chooses another student to pull him/her out of the spider web by answering the question correctly. The second student answers with “Yes I am” and chooses another student to help out by answering correctly. They continue until everyone has had a turn. This game is great for practicing questions and answers.
- Monster Mash
Have your students sit in a circle and start making up words that describe monsters. You can use any word that comes to mind, and don’t worry about being too silly! Once you have made up all the words you can think of, ask each student to choose one monster from the list to describe in detail (i.g., slimy, green, giant teeth…). Then have them draw their monster on paper while describing what they drew using as many details.
- Candy Corn Tongue Strengthening
Make your own tongue depressors out of craft sticks and white foam cut into triangles for the game Candy Corn Tongue Strengthening. Have your students hold their tongue depressors between their lips – one end in each corner of their mouth – then have them “walk” the candy corn from one end to the other by moving their tongues up and down while holding each side of the candy corn with their lips. You could even have them try to carry 2 or 3 pieces of candy corn at a time.
- Candy Corn Syllable Counting
Use candy corn to count out syllables in words. Start with two or three syllables, and see if the student can guess how many syllables there are in words such as “Halloween” or “witch”. You can make this game more difficult by not actually showing them the candy corn, but instead just telling them how many you counted for each word. The student should repeat the word after you clap out the number of syllables.
- Jack-O-Lantern Paint
Use a pumpkin template or make your own to draw a jack-o-lantern face on paper. Each time you ask a question, the student has to color in one part of their jack-o-lantern! You can then ask the student to describe their jack-o-lantern once they have finished the game (“My jack-o-lantern has four squares for eyes”). This game works well for describing and answering wh questions.
- Halloween Charades
This is just like regular charades, but with Halloween-themed prompts. These could be characters from Halloween movies or books, Halloween words, Halloween activities—the possibilities are endless.
Halloween is not only a time to dress up in costumes and eat candy, it can also be a great time to work on speech therapy goals. In fact, many of the activities that you do during Halloween are already designed to help children practice speech and language skills. For example, when trick-or-treating, children are asked to say “trick or treat” and thank the person who gives them candy. This makes trick-or-treating an easy way to work on articulation goals and even social language goals. Halloween is a fun time of year for everyone, but it can be especially exciting for children with speech delays. They get to dress up as their favorite characters and practice their speech goals in a low-pressure environment.