Amp up the fun with easy monster activities for preschool speech therapy.
What's the secret to planning fun preschool speech therapy sessions that will have kids begging to participate? Incorporating themes: colorful, relatable, and exciting themes! Monsters are incredibly fun for October (or anytime), so invite a few monsters to your sessions and you'll have your preschoolers excited to dive right in.No worries if your school doesn't allow Halloween-themed activities, I'll note which activities have a Halloween reference. Most don't.
Kick-off your session with some music and movement to capture your preschooler's attention.
Youtube videos are great for this. You'll also find them fantastic for a mid-session break that will re-energize your littles and improve focus.
My favorite preschool-friendly monster videos on Youtube
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| The Learning Station has lots of great videos to get preschoolers moving. |
Monster Shuffle by the Learning Station. Get 'em up and dancing with this fun video led by three colorful and friendly monsters.
Five Little Monsters Jumping on the Bed by Little Baby Bum. Have your kids jump along with the song, then "fall down" with each little monster and you'll burn some mid-session energy for sure.
Stand Up, Sit Down Action Songs for Children by Fun Kids English has a nice slow pace for your littlest ones.
The Open Shut Them videos by Super Simple Songs feature cute little monsters that teach opposites:
Open Shut Them #2 teaches opposites like happy and sad, hot and cold.
Open/Shut them #4 teaches opposites like clean and dirty, high and low.
What's this, What's that? by Super Simple Songs is great for early vocabulary. Your preschoolers will guess and name the shadow images (dog, cat, grog, etc) in this gameshow-themed video and then watch them come to life in color.
And a Sing-Along version of one of my favorite books!
Go Away Big Green Monster Sing-Along by Bri Reads
Halloween Themed Videos:
Ten Scary Monsters by the Kiboomers is a count-down song that repeats "scary" and "monsters" making it great for initial /m/ and /sk/ blend too.
Go Away Big Green Monster is a fun story that empowers children to face their fears and say Go Away!
Read a great monster picture story.
I definitely think getting the book so you can touch it, show it and even turn the pages together is the best story experience. But if you can't get your hands on a book you need, search Youtube for a read-aloud that lets you see the text. Listen or turn off the sound and read it yourself. It's a great option for teletherapy too! With virtual therapy in mind, I'll link read-alouds from Youtube.
Please note, the links in this post are working now as of October 2020, but if you find one that no longer works later on, please let me know by leaving me a comment so I can fix it. Thanks!
Glad Monster, Sad Monster by Ed Emberly and Anne Miranda is a story about feelings.
Monsters Don't Eat Broccoli by Barbara Jean Hicks. A fun rhyming book with a refrain of Fum Fo Fie Fee monsters don't eat broccoli!
Go to Bed Monster by Natasha Wing. A little girl who is just not sleepy draws a monster friend to play with!
There's a Nightmare in my Closet by Mercer Meyer
And my all-time favorite monster book:
Go Away Big Green Monster by Ed Emberly. I love the cut-outs in the pictures that "layer" the monster parts as you read. With repetitive text, it's an awesome sound-loaded story for initial /g/ and /m/, syllables and working on sentence length as children repeat "Go away!" Perfect for labeling body parts and talking about feeling words too.
Read this post for more great ideas on how to use this awesome story in your therapy sessions. Go Away Big Green Monster! Best-Ever Books for Halloween Speech Therapy
Play a Monster Game
Play Pink Cat Studios Build a Monster Game for online fun. You can find lots more internet-based games for other themes in this post: 27 Online Games for Speech Therapy You Need to Know About.
Glue one wiggle eye to the center of each green plastic cup and you have a have fun stack them up and knock it down game. Switch it up by turning them right side up and put them in a grid. Then toss a ping pong ball or large pompom in them.
Try an easy arts and crafts monster project, and give them more to talk about!
Tissue Box Monster
Make this easy monster and feed your therapy cards to him! All you need is a tissue box, white construction paper or poster board and, scissors and glue.
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| Make this easy tissue box monster. He eats cards of course! |
Playdough Monster
Have some sensory fun with playdough and googly eyes. You can give wiggle eye for each response. Whose monster has the most eyes? Who has the least?
Have some sensory fun with playdough and googly eyes. You can give wiggle eye for each response. Whose monster has the most eyes? Who has the least?
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| Playdough monster- a simple activity that's lots of fun! |
Squish Monster
When you're feeling brave, get out the tempera paint, some construction paper, and make a few "monster parts." Children put the paint on one side of the paper, then "squish" it together. Open it up to see your monster face. They all come out so pretty and unique. Add facial features and you'll have a unique art project to send home. You'll target body parts, action words, color words, and can re-tell how you made it!
Planning is a snap with these fun monster-themed resources in my store:
These fun resources work great with any monster story you have:
Go Away Big Green Monster Book Companion Tons of activities to target goals for pre-k to 1st grade including my favorite object function cards (use these ALL the time), WH questions, regular and irregular past-tense verbs, plurals, categories, and following directions.
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| Try this smash mat for increasing sentence length and articulation practice! |
Monster's Munch Bundle includes a monster prepositions game, an articulation story, and lots of fun language activities.
Build-a-Monster Articulation Boom Cards target 13 mid-later phonemes in all word positions, blends, and vocalic R too. It gets you a high number of repetitions as kids say their word or sentence each time they drag a body part to make their monster. You can use this activity all year. It's so fun, I found myself slightly obsessed with making monsters!
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| Build-A Monster Articulation Boom Cards |
Pin it for later!
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| Lots of ideas for fun preschool monster activities in speech therapy! |
I hope you got a few great ideas for some monstrously fun speech and language therapy sessions!
Have fun!