Ideas to Celebrate Valentine's Day
Speech Therapy
A Crankenstein Valentines Day is a great book for targeting a variety of goals. Centered around a child who is not at all thrilled about Valentine’s day, the book provides opportunities to target speech sound goals (lots of /s/ and /v/ words in this book), vocabulary, and perspective-taking. Try this book out with your elementary-age kids and see if you can find the Crankenstein in your bunch!
Feeding Therapy
We use heart-shaped cookie cutters all the time in feeding therapy. It is a great tool for taking daunting ‘shapeless’ purees like yogurt and applesauce and forming them into a fun shape that kids are willing to interact with. The cookie cutters get the clients to the ‘interaction’ stage. Cookie cutters can also be used with any flat foods (bread, sliced apples/pears, tortillas). Here’s a recipe for homemade tortilla chips that can be made into any shape for your little Valentine.
Occupational Therapy
Lacing cards are a versatile activity and can be used to help with many occupational therapy goals. Here are three different examples:
If a child has been struggling to work with laces during shoe tying, they can really become frustrated. Instead of practicing shoe tying like he has been doing regularly at home, and sometimes in therapy sessions, try a fun, themed lacing card to target the same fine motor skills in a new way.
Many of our clients struggle with direction following and seated attention. The multi-step component of this activity can be great in addition to modeling and verbal prompting.
A child who struggles with grading force and is a proprioceptive seeker can benefit from hole punching during the activity. The child can get her big squeezes in and have some of that desired input. But, when it comes to lacing right after, she will quickly discover the need to downgrade her force in order to not rip through the paper holes, therefore physically seeing the effects of grading force!
For step by step instructions, check out one of these links:
Fun In the Clinic
This month our clinic theme is "BLT is Growing Friendships." We're talking about how we can be good friends and share our caring. If you're coming into the clinic be sure to pick up one of our craft packets. They include the materials to make a scrunched tissue paper heart craft. Or, you can make one of these cute tissue paper heart flowers at home.
Take a picture of your creation, share it on social media, and use the hashtag #bltfriends so we can see your creation!
Scrunching tissue paper is a nice sensory activity and a great way to open up conversations while you are crafting.
You can ask questions like
"How does the paper feel?"
"What does it sound like?"
"Can you tear it easily?"
"What colors will you use?"
More Ideas for Celebrating Valentine’s Day
Here are a few fun activities from around the web!
