As I’m moving into a new speech room, I’m organizing my preschool toys by season. During this year I’m making it a goal to post some recommended toys and games to use in speech therapy.
I’ve got some old and new favorites perfect for September, October, and November. I’m including Amazon affiliate links below so you can easily find them!
Attribute Apples: I love these apples that I reviewed back in 2012.
They are wonderful for preschool for comparing and contrasting and working on the use of comparatives and superlatives.
Little People toys are just the best. I use them to target positional concepts, pronouns, verbs, expanding expressive language, following directions, WH questions, and much more! I scored a big lot of Fall themed Little People on eBay a while back. You can buy these sets through Amazon or directly from the Fisher Price website.
Thanksgiving Celebration
Harvest Hayride
Trick or Treat Surprise
Pumpkin Party
Play in the orchard with Hi-Ho-Cherry-O. This classic game is a fall favorite!
Squiggly Worms is a really cute ‘apple’ with escaping worms. My students love this one!
The Sneaky Snacky Squirrel Game is an adorable game featuring a little squirrel friend.
Games like these are perfect for working on turn taking, initiating, and being a good sport!
Over the summer I shared Chipmunk Chompers with you! I really love this set!
It’s great for phonological skills and learning letters!
Do you have older preschoolers/K students working on articulation or language tasks? This pumpkin Lego set could be really fun. They could practice saying several learning targets for practice before earning a piece of the set! It’s on my wish list!
If you have a Lego Lover it would be great!
Those are the toys in my cabinet for September, October, and November. What will you be playing with? Comment below and I might add some to my list!
13 Comments
i LOVE the pumpkin Lego’s!!!
I love the tried and true games and excited to try the new ones (like the squirrel game). Thanks for the ideas!
I teach a Norwegian-language class through play for toddlers/preschoolers and also tutor a 5-year-old in Norwegian language. For fall, we use silk leaves, real acorns, leaves & apples made of plastic that are actuall fall table scatters from the craft store, but some toys as well. I like using apples from the Dollar Tree and silk leaves because we talk about all the different colors and color shades. The table scatter can be sorted with tweezers into apples and leaves as well as used for manipulatives on do-a-dot boards as a reinforcer. As far as actual toys, I like the Halloween Toob from Safari Ltd and the Playmobil farm, horse, and harvest sets.
One of my favorite games is a card game called Slamwich by Gamewright. It has pictures of sandwich ingredients. I use it in November as Thanksgiving approaches. It’s great for articulation, especially for /r/ and /s/. The students label each ingredient as they place it on the card pile (green lettuce, red tomatoes, etc.) I tweek the rules a little bit to use the game for pragmatics and language. I have used it to reinforce basic concepts and prepositions, and for helping autistic students converse. My students ask to play this game. They love it.
Thank you for the great game suggestions. I like the apples activity since we are working on descriptive features of objects.
these are great! Do u have it in a handout format to give to parents? I’m also looking for one that gives recommendations on toys to buy for children for the holidays! I do a monthly newsletter and would love to include the above and something for the holidays and will make sure credit is given to you.
My students LOVE that squirrel game
This is fantastic I just ordered two games! Also Apple POP is another one for the fall. I can’t wait to see what the winter ones are. Do you know when you might post that? Would be great before the holidays to hit up sales.
Here are the winter ones: https://thespeechroomnews.com/2014/12/winter-toys-and-games-for-speech-and-language-therapy.html
Bought Sneaky Snacky Squirrel this fall and my preschoolers are having fun with it. Paired it with the book Leaf Trouble and some fun no-prep autumn leaves art projects. This October my preschoolers have been loving the game Go Away Monster from Gamewright. Simple game but they requested it again and again.
I bought the game First Orchard by HABA, which is perfect for Early Intervention. It’s a cooperative game, so it reduces the hurt feelings of competition. You set up 4 tree tiles, with 4 wooden fruits on each tree: red apples, green apples, yellow pears, blue plums. You also set up a 5-step path with a wooden raven, who wants to reach the orchard and eat all the fruit before it is harvested.. The students roll a die, and either get a color of fruit they can pick into a communal basket, a free-choice, or the raven. If you get the raven, he takes a step down the path toward the orchard. Set up sounds complicated, but it’s really 2 minutes, and it’s good sorting practice for the kids to put the fruit on the correct trees. GREAT for lower-functioning kids working on turn-taking and early concepts (color, object labels), and older kids like it too. It’s good for WH- questions (What happens now? Who goes next? Where do you put the apple?), good for multi-step directions, good reinforcement hook for speech-sound drills, and effortless to expand into pretend play after the game ends. (Let’s have a picnic! The raven is pecking seeds off the path.) Not well-known, but a great therapy game.