Decorating a Christmas Tree

Last week in speech was all about decorating a Christmas Tree!  We were able to hit so many speech-language concepts.  Here is an over view of what we did:

Books:

We also read a story that I wrote with my own dog!  You can get it here.  This story is a sequencing story of my dog putting up a Christmas tree.  It targets holiday vocabulary words, sequencing, and answering questions.

My coworker and I also pulled out all of our Christmas books and filled up our reading center!

Small World Play:

 Our small world play was a "Christmas Wonderland."  It contained tinsel and all sorts of different "holiday" vocabulary words from stickers, erasers, and other toys.

Sequencing Activity:

For our sequencing activity we decorated a Christmas tree!  I had a visual for all of the students to use.  We worked on a lot of vocabulary words too with the ornaments.  I had ornaments in the shape of reindeer, Santa, balls, bows, lights, and starts.  They were all different colors, so we worked on colors and requesting specific ornaments. It was also easy to  make this into an articulation lesson with all of the /s/ sounds (i.e. star, bows, lights, Santa).

Question of the Day:

Our question of the day was "When you decorate a Christmas tree, do you like to put up ornaments or garland?  The students then put their name under their answer. After, we talked about what everyone has on their tree at home!

Apples

This week and next we will be learning about apples!  Here is the book we will be reading:

The book is super long and wordy, so I will not be reading all of the words.  Instead, I will paraphrase and talk about the pictures.  

We will also be doing a "small world activity" about apples.  I made an apple orchard in an old small briefcase.  It will be a language activity by talking about all of the different family members that are at the orchard. We will talk about picking apples from the trees and putting them in baskets.  

Here is the targeted vocabulary:

apple tree

pick

basket

orchard

family

We will also use this play as a category activity.  I will have other fruits in the orchard, and we will talk about which fruits are apples and belong on the apple trees.  I have a bucket that says "no" where we will put all of the non apples.

For a closer look, I used green playdough for the base of the tree, and put in leaves from a fake flower arrangement I have.  I used bigger apples from a sorting activity we have at school, and the small apples and baskets are from "Hi Ho Cheery-o."  

Here is the background I used in the briefcase:

I got the idea from the blog my nearest and dearest.  Look at her blog for other great ideas for "invitation to play" or "small world play."

We will also be doing the following apple finger play:

Here are the different photos you will need to do it at home:  

I will also be hiding large apples around the classroom for the children to find.  We will then put the apples in a big basket.  I used the following template, and I will print out the apples on green, yellow, and red apples. After, we will count all of the apples and talk about the different colors.

I also made an apple tree for the kids! They will pick the apples off of the tree so they can learn what apple picking feels like! There are "Pp" and "Bb" on all of the apples. We will be distinguishing between the two different sounds and letters.