Get Ready For Spring: Fun Activities and Resources For Pediatric Speech, Occupational, and Physical Therapy
April 15, 2022
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The flowers are blooming, the birds are singing, and the temperature is warming. Spring is here!
For SLP/As, OT/As, and PT/As, it's a great time to keep kids engaged in therapy by changing up the routine.
In the spirit of spring, we’ve created a brand-new collection of fun Activity Lists and PDF resources you could use with your patients all season and beyond.
Whether your discipline is speech, language, feeding, occupational, or physical therapy, we've got you covered. Read on to learn more about our spring-themed resources and how you can use them to breathe new life into your therapy sessions.
Spring-Themed Activity Lists, PDF Resources, and Games
Ambiki's spring-themed Activity Lists enhance therapy sessions in-person or in teletherapy. They can include lists of concepts, exercises, sounds, foods, and more. You can display them as a slideshow or use them as a printable for in-person sessions.
You can use the lists alone, but they also work great with Ambiki's games. With just a click, you can easily integrate a spring activity list into the game of your choice.
Image of Activity List played in a game
Ambiki's PDF resources are visuals or manipulatives. You can also use these alone, or combine them with related activity lists. If you use them together, think of the lists as a guide for how to use the related PDF resources.
Image of Spring Things Resource
Let's take a closer look at how you can effectively use our spring-themed lists, resources, and games specifically for speech, language, feeding, occupational, and physical therapy.
Speech Therapy
Our clinician-created spring Activity Lists consist of phonemes, blends, words, minimal pairs, phrases, sentences and/or paragraphs.
Other Activity Lists target multisyllabic words used alone and in phrases, sentences, and paragraphs so you can scale up and scale down in difficulty. For example, our April Fool's Day collection of multisyllabic words related to jokes includes:
Image of Kiki Celebrates Spring PDF Resource, Activity List, and Game used together
Think broadly about what you can use for artic or phonology work. Every Activity List has a list of all the phonemes and blends present in the list. This Spring Flowers Vocabulary list has /l/ and /d/ and could work for vowelization or affrication.
Our Kiki is Flying Activity List is great for working on following one-, two-, and three-step directions.
Combine this list with the Kiki Is Flying comic, a resource that you can also use for targeting comprehension, vocabulary, and sentence formulation. It also includes a blank comic for practicing expressive language.
Again, you can also use any of these lists with games. For example, you could integrate the Spring Wh Questions list with Spin Control, a game that allows you to spin a wheel to determine which item from the list you'll be practicing.
You can effectively use some of our other spring resources for language therapy as well. Kiki Celebrates Spring is a story with spring vocabulary to help with reading, problem solving, identifying steps, asking or answering questions, making predictions/inferences, recalling, describing, comparing, targeting verbs, and improving fluency or articulation.
Kiki Celebrates Spring Story
The Spring Things resource includes a collection of 70 images you can use to teach vocabulary and spring-related concepts. Use one of the many related spring activity lists with this resource for divergent or convergent categories, same/different, or following directions. Alternatively, you can easily make your own list to use with this resource.
Occupational Therapy
Many of the resources created for language therapy can be also used for occupational therapy. For example, just about any activity list can be used as a prompt for handwriting, or you can use lists for following directions to work on sequencing.
You can also target occupational therapy goals with spring-themed resources like the 60-Minute Easter Egg Decoration Recipe, which includes step-by-step instructions for decorating eggs decoupage style and a photo story with visuals illustrating each step.
Image of Easter Egg Decoration Photo Story
The Kiki is Flying resource is perfect for OT month or anytime during spring, and you can use it for fine motor skills and handwriting. This comic tells the origin story of why Ambiki's ambassador, Kiki, wears a cape when flying despite having wings. It also features an occupational therapist who works with Kiki.
Use the Draw a Ladybug resource to help improve drawing and visuospatial skills for handwriting. You can also target fine motor skills, sitting balance, and bilateral coordination.
Image of Draw a Ladybug Resource
The Handwriting with Joke Concepts PDF worksheets are great for practicing letter formation. They also help test expressive and receptive language skills, as each of the terms are synonyms for jokes or joking.
Use the Spring Handwriting worksheets featuring cute baby animals to practice letter formation. You can also target receptive language skills, as the child will match the word to the picture of the concept.
Feeding Therapy
Our clinicians also created fun spring recipes and photo stories that you can use for feeding therapy.
The recipes include supplies, ingredients, and procedures. All these items are easily available at any grocery store. The related photo stories include step-by-step images of the recipe from start to finish.
Image of Dirt Trifle and Strawberry Shortcake Recipes and Photo Stories
Make these recipes with your patients to target sensory, behavioral, and nutritional goals. Try:
Strawberry Shortcake Recipe and Photo Story - Spring is the season for strawberries, and it's the perfect time to make this shortcake in feeding therapy.
Dirt Trifle Recipe and Photo Story - Eat "dirt and worms" by making this fun recipe featuring gummy worms, crushed-up Oreos, and pudding.
Finally, Ambiki's spring collection also includes themed resources for physical therapy.
Think of these as 'playlists'. All of these playlists have activities to help with coordination, core strength, upper and lower extremity strength, and crossing the midline.
You can upgrade or downgrade the activities by modifying sets and repetitions, adding or removing weight, etc.
We recommend using the spring physical therapy resources as themed packets including a PDF resource, Activity List, and game:
Teach with a printed, laminated copy of a resource or pull it up in a teletherapy session if you are doing a virtual session.
On another day, play a game with the above list to keep the student guessing about what will come next. E.g., Icy Dicey, Spin Control, and Recollection Perfection.
