St. Patrick’s Day Activities To Promote Speech & Language Skills
St. Patrick’s day is quickly approaching! Holidays like St. Patrick’s Day are a fun way to build your child's language skills and understanding of traditions. Language skills are easy to incorporate whether you are working on them at home or during speech-language therapy. Below are some of my favorite St. Patrick’s Day activities you can do with your child.
St. Patrick’s Day Bingo
St. Patrick’s Day Bingo is a fun way to work on many language skills including vocabulary, wh-questions (‘what’, ‘who’, ‘where’, ‘when’), pragmatic language, and sentence structure. Make your own bingo board with your child.
Cook Together
Cooking is a fun activity to do with your child and you can work on sequencing, following directions, and vocabulary at the same time. There are several recipes you can make for St. Patrick’s Day. Some of my favorites recipes to make are Shamrock Shakes and Irish Soda Bread.
Four Leaf Clover Scavenger Hunt
Scavenger hunts can be both fun and helpful for language development at the same time. Cut out four leaf clovers and write St. Patrick’s Day vocabulary words or targeted sounds for articulation on them and hide the four leaf clovers around the house. Next, have your child go on a scavenger hunt looking for the four leaf clovers. As the clovers are found, have your child formulate sentences with the words on the clover. This is also a good opportunity to work on prepositions by having your child use prepositions to describe where he or she found the clover such as, “I found the four leaf clover under the table.”
St. Patrick’s Day Books
There are several books about St. Patrick’s Day that you can choose to read depending on your child’s reading level. Some of my favorites include:
How To Catch A Leprechaun by Adam Wallace
The Night St. Patrick’s Day by Natasha Wing
The Itsy Bitsy Leprechaun by Jeffrey Burton and Saja Resceck
There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed A Clover! by Lucille Colandro
As you read each story ask questions related to the book and have your child identify the objects in pictures. This will also help improve vocabulary.
Arts and Crafts
Making St. Patrick’s Day themed arts and crafts is a perfect opportunity to work on various language skills. You can work on following directions (for example, “Put one green shamrock on the paper”), prepositions (for example, “Put the leprechaun under the rainbow”), and adjectives (for example, have the children request items for their project by adjective such as , “I need the small blue paintbrush”).
Pot of Gold
First make gold coins and write words on them with your child’s targeted speech sounds for articulation or vocabulary words. Put the coins in a pot and have your child pick out the gold coins one at a time. As your child picks the coins have him or her say word on the coin. Depending on the language skills you are addressing, have your child use the words in phrases or sentences or define the vocabulary word.
I hope that you and your child enjoy these St. Patrick’s Day activities! Additionally, feel free to contact In Home Speech Solutions if you have questions or concerns or if there’s anything we can help with.
Jennifer Price M.S., CCC-SLP Lead Speech-Language Pathologist & Owner