St. Patrick's Day Theme Lesson Plans for Speech Therapy
St. Patrick’s Day has a different feeling to it this year. In the past, St. Patrick’s Day at school was a fun, light holiday, full of crafts, scavenger hunts, Leprechaun trickery, and bright colors. But this year, it serves as an intense reminder of how much the world has changed this past year and how much change we as educators have gone through to help care for our students. If this week is difficult for anyone, just know, I see you, you are not alone in that, it is okay to need time for yourself this week (and also any other week!) and practice some self-care.
Last year I wrote this St. Patrick’s Day Blog Post that includes a craft freebie, links to my favorite St. Patrick’s Day resources, my favorite thematic books (with YouTube read aloud links) and a round up of other TPT freebies. But as many of us are still providing tele-therapy and have remote learning students, I wanted to update my St. Paddy’s Day list to include some of my favorite craft ideas, online games, Boom card activities, and favorite songs for St. Patrick’s Day themed therapy!
Crafts
Crafts are an amazing way to target following directions, articulation, phonological processes, expanding phrases, verb phrases, adjectives, eliciting spontaneous language and more! They make great activities to complete in a therapy room or for a whole class activity if you’re pushing into a class one day. Does anyone run a Motor-Speech group with the teams OT? Crafts are a perfect way to target fine motor skills and speech-language skills at the same time!
Draw your own leprechaun face thanks to this Crayola Printable. You could just draw the face then color the leprechaun, but I love printing them, cutting a silhouette of the leprechaun, then using Orange Puffy Paint to let my students design their own beards. Puffy Paint is equal parts shaving cream and liquid glue. Then you can use food coloring to dye it red, orange, or whatever color your students want.
There are tons of fruit loop crafts this time of year! They make the perfect material for rainbow projects. You can glue them to a piece of construction paper to make a rainbow, targeting different speech and language skills throughout the activity. You can string them along yarn to make a necklace. I like to make rainbows by stringing them along pipe cleaners, or miniature pretzel sticks. Marshmallows use great bases to support your food-only creations.
Popsicle Sticks make great craft supplies for St. Patrick’s Day activities! You can paint the plain ones, or buy packs of pre-colored ones like these ones here. You can make the most adorable leprechaun hats by attaching six sticks together vertically, gluing two sticks horizontally to the bottom, then creating a buckle with black construction paper.
Take a look here for more St. Patrick’s Day Craft Ideas!
Games
Boom Cards
St. Patrick’s Day Flashlight I Spy
St. Patrick’s Day Open Ended Game Board (Pair with your favorite online dice or spinner, and choose your own language targets as you race to the finish line)
St. Patrick’s Day Build a Potato Head
Also check out my St. Patrick’s Day Sneaky Leprechaun Boom Deck that is a great way to target expanding utterances, basic concepts, describing and more!
Songs
St. Patrick’s Day Boom Chicka Boom
