Halloween Playdough: The Language Learning Way

Halloween will be here before you know it, and what better way to celebrate than by engaging in a fun activity with your child?!

Making this Halloween-themed play dough together is a great way to work on speech and language skills like sequencing, following directions, Halloween vocabulary, core vocabulary, constructive play skills, social communication, and much more!

Here’s what you need:

Ingredients:

-2½ cups flour measured, plus more for adding in later if needed

-½ cup salt

-3 tablespoons oil (canola will work)

-3 tablespoons cream of tartar

-2 cups water

-Red and yellow food coloring (or the color of your child’s choice)

-Optional – pumpkin pie spice

Other Materials:

-Large bowl

-Smaller bowls for measuring ingredients

-Spoon, whisk, or spatula to mix dough

-Visuals: You want to have out all the visuals that your child is currently using or working on using.  A few great ones are: waiting, my turn, help, and more.

Steps:

1. Get all of your ingredients out and ready to use. You can narrate where you are going to get each item (i.e., “Flour is in the pantry!” or, “We need water from the sink!”). Your child can help gather the materials. This is a great naturalistic activity that will help increase receptive language, following directions, independence and more.

2. Have an adult carefully boil the water.  During this time you can have your child color/water paint/paint a Halloween (1 – 3) color pages while you wait for the water to boil. 

3. With your child, measure all ingredients into separate bowls. Your child can help you either measure the ingredients; dump the ingredients in bowls, or both! Narrate or sing about what you are doing… “Put the salt in the bowl, in the bowl!” Remember, this increases their language!

4. Add food coloring to the water to reach your desired color. For fun, Halloween-themed orange play dough, add five drops of yellow food coloring and five drops of red food coloring. Stir with a spoon and adjust as needed. Remember to be careful – the water will be hot! Talk about the colors you are adding, then watch and enjoy the water change colors!

5. Put all of the ingredients in your large bowl. Start with the dry ingredients, then add in the liquid ingredients.

6. Grab a spoon or mixing tool and mix the play dough! A song will help a child attend to or participate within the task as well as comment about what you are doing… “This is the way you mix the dough, mix the dough, mix the dough. This is the way you mix the dough. Mix, mix the play dough!” An adult may check the temperature to see if it is safe to mix with your hands.

7. Check the texture of the play dough. If it’s too sticky, add more flour. If it’s too dry, add some oil. With an older child, this may be a great time to work on vocabulary to describe different textures as well as problem solve how to achieve the ideal texture.

8. Knead the dough until all the flour is mixed in and the texture is not too sticky or too dry.

9. Let the dough cool.

10. While the dough is cooling off, clean up together!  If you need more time then try to play Halloween Dress Up or a Halloween Game.

11. Finally, time to play!

Here are a few additional tips for encouraging speech and language within this activity:

General vocabulary:

There is a lot of great vocabulary you can introduce while you make the dough as well as playing with the dough. Flour, salt, help, water, careful, hot, color names, mix, stir, knead, sticky, squish, roll, in, out, push, and more…the possibilities are endless.

Halloween-specific vocabulary:

With a set of cookie cutters, you can introduce a lot of different Halloween vocabulary….ghost, bat, pumpkin, haunted house, and more. Even without cookie cutters, you can use your imagination and create these Halloween characters.

Play skills:

Creating shapes, characters, and more with play dough will help increase your child’s constructive play skills. You can also work on your child’s symbolic (pretend) play skills by pretending while using your child’s play dough creations (i.e., using a play dough ghost to play “pretend trick or treat”).

Requesting and making choices:

When playing with play dough, give your child multiple opportunities to request and make choices – i.e., “Mommy, I want the pumpkin cookie cutter”.

Directing attention:

As your child is playing with the dough, help him show others what he has created – i.e., “Look Daddy, I made a pumpkin!”

Older children:

This activity is great for sequencing, following directions, and describing how to do something. First, use a visual to talk about the steps you will soon perform. Be sure to use your sequencing words (i.e., first, next, then, last, finally, etc.). Then, help your child follow the recipe, stepping in when adult help is needed. After you’ve made the play dough together, help your child describe the steps to a peer, sibling, or other adult.

We hope this play dough activity helps put your family in the Halloween spirit while working on play and language skills. Happy Halloween!

Play dough recipe taken and modified from: http://www.notimeforflashcards.com/2008/01/playdough-recipes-i-love.html

~KidSpeak, LLC

The Picture Communication Symbols ©1981-2018 Tobbi Dynavox

are used under contractual agreement and were created by KidSpeak, LLC.  All rights reserved worldwide.

A Fa-BOO-lous Halloween Craft

Each year we try to post 1 -2 new Halloween Art Activities because is a ton of  language opportunities in art and even more in Halloween art!

At office we do A TON of art with all of our kids……but each kid is working on different skills.  These skills include: vocabulary skills, theme related vocabulary skills, fine motor skills, following written directions, following verbal directions from teachers, following verbal directions from peers, sequencing skills, preposition skills, problem solving skills, visual spatial skills, a handful of social communication skills (i.e.: making choices, asking for help, taking turns, requesting, commenting and much more), and so much more!!  

In our blog today we want to show you all the great things you can work on while making a Halloween Ghost!!!

First things first…..you need to get all your supplies:

Black paper

White Tissue Paper

Cotton Balls

Glue

Scissors

Any visuals you want to use during this activity

Next…..be prepared

Example: Many of our kids need to see an example of what they are doing so that they can 1) understand what they are doing and 2) help them put everything together.  For younger kids you many only need 1 example but for some older kids if you are working on them making “different” ghosts then you may want to have a few examples.

Before you start make sure you have all your pieces cut out and ready to go or have templates for your kids to cut out: eyes, mouths, etc.

Visuals -- make sure that you have your visuals for the activity ready to go.

Remember the MORE prepared you are the easier the activity will flow – which means you will be able to hit all your target areas!

Now it’s time to play and create your ghosts.  Remember you can get creative and make different colored ghosts!

Next let’s talk about all the GREAT Concepts/Skills you can work each day:

Fine Motor

As an SLP we are not OT’s so we are not “teaching them their fine motor skills” but we can help them with this skill and support what their OT is working on (collaborating with other professionals is always a must).  For our kids that have difficulty coloring/gluing/tracing/cutting…..this activity may be hard.  For these kids we sing/chant while we color and glue about what we are doing such as “squeeze squeeze squeeze --  squeeze squeeze squeeze -- squeeze squeeze squeeze – squeeze the glue out” (with the liquid glue).  We also take turns coloring/cutting/tracing/gluing.  By taking turns with your child this helps increase their attention to the activity, understanding of the skill, and much more!

Beginning Social Communication Skills

They can work on making choices for different color eyes/mouths or different shapes such as: “black eyes or blue eyes”, “circle eyes or square eyes”, and more. requesting “I want the blue ghost”; asking for help “help”, “help open”, “help open glue”; taking turns “my turn”, “it’s your turn”, “it’s Manda’s turn”, “my turn glue”; directing attention “look”, “wow look at the colors”; commenting “wow”, “cool”, “I like….” and more.  

Social Pragmatic Skills

Here are a few ways to turn this simple activity into a more social activity with peers: 1) have the children work together in pairs and take turns; 2) have the children work in pairs focusing on one child doing the activity and one child in charge of the supplies….this way they have to request/listen/respond to their peers…..then they can switch; 3) have 2 or more make a few together where they make a “group plan” on how they are going to color each coffee filter and then follow through with their plan; and more.

Compliments

If your kids are not yet ready to work in pairs then doing parallel play but working on pausing and giving compliments is a great way to work on monitoring our peers, listening to our peers and more.  When we work on compliments we first work on the phrase “I like + object” such as “I like your cool ghost”.  Next we work on “why” such as “I like + object, because….” Such as “I like your ghost because it’s cool!”.  Next we work on giving a compliment on our peers “actions” and combining the information from above such as “I like the way you cut out a silly ghost face, it’s so cool!”

Following Direction Skills

You can have the kids complete this activity by following written directions, visual directions, verbal directions from the teacher and even verbal directions from their peers.

How To’s

  One of our favorite things to work on is “how tos” where the kids create the activity, then they tell their partner “how to” create the same activity (the goal for it to look the exact same) using their words only.  A lot of our kids do a great job when they can use their actions…..but when they use their words only this opens up the door for us to work on helping them understand communication breakdowns and repair them. 

Story Telling/Writing

If your child is working on story telling or story writing then you can have them create a story to go along with their monster!

Haunted House

For some of our kids at the end of the month we use all the art they made and have them create a Haunted House in the therapy room – they LOVE this.

We hope that you enjoy making Ghosts with your kids as much as we do!

~KidSpeak, LLC

The Picture Communication Symbols ©1981-2018 Tobii Dynavox are used under contractual agreement and were created by KidSpeak, LLC.  All rights reserved worldwide.