Forest Themed Lesson Plan for Speech Therapy

Activity #1: Choose any "forest" or "woodland" themed book you can start your session off with. Pair the story with forest themed play-props that you can pair with your forest play-scene. Talk about the different animals you might find going to the forest and what animals you saw in the story. 

Activity #2: Forest themed puzzle! This particular puzzle is a Crayola stamp puzzle purchased at Marshalls and is simple but provides many opportunities to target themed vocabulary, following directions, spatial concepts, expanding utterances, requesting and more! You can make this activity go as long or as short as you would like! Hide the puzzle pieces in a sensory bin or around the room. Practice the spatial concepts "on", "in", "under", "beside", "behind" as you find the animals around the room and also talk about where they are located on the puzzle (e.g., the frog is ON the lily pad). Then have the child use the stamps on a piece of paper and create a forest play scene by listening to what animal they need to stamp and where they need to put it (i.e., targeting following directions). Have them add stickers or color in different items they would see in their forest such as a log, trees, rocks, hills, etc. You could also practice s-blends while stamping each animal (e.g., STamp it on, put it in it's SPot, etc.).  

Activity #3: Forest themed finger puppets and ball popper toys! Set up any forest animals on a table and have the student practice knocking them over with the ball popper. You can have the child practice speech sounds when doing this activity (e.g., /s-blends/: squeeze, stick, stand; /k,g/: knock, pick, go, get, got; etc.) , expanding utterances (e.g., I hit the bear!), or describing (e.g., describe the animal you knock down with 3 descriptors). 

Activity #4: Animal Movement Activities! Place animal paw/foot prints or animal silhouettes around the room. Have the child use a ball popper to try and hit a paw print while practicing their speech sounds or language targets. Laminate them and place targets on the prints or numbers to indicate how many times they will practice the sound at word level. Another way is placing different laminated animals or coloured animals around the room. This provides great opportunities for practicing verbs and following directions: e.g., jump to the orange squirrel, crawl to the brown squirrel etc.). 

Activity #5: Surprise Bags! Here I have my tree drawstring bag filled with a variety of forest themed plastic animals. Have the child place his/her hand into the bag and pull out an animal. Practice speech sounds (e.g., pre-selecting animals that use your target sound; pair with play-dough and have the animals "STomp" in the play-dough each time to see what kind of foot print they make), multisyllabic words (e.g., beaver, racoon, etc.), plurals (frog vs. frogs; 1 moose vs. 2 moose), describing (e.g., provide 3 descriptors for each animal); spatial concepts (e.g., create a play-scene with the animals and fairy garden figurines/paper play-props - have the child put the animals in the water, on the mountain, beside the tree, etc.) and way more!

If you end up using any of these themed activities in your sessions be sure to tag us on instagram @playbasedspeechtherapycourse. We love hearing what's helpful and working for you in your sessions!

Lastly, are you looking for more lesson plan ideas and ways to use play in your sessions??? Be sure to check out our previous blog posts or our FREE webinar ! We provide our course members with hundreds of ideas on how to use play in therapy and break it down in such a way that you can take the ideas and use them the very next day in your own therapy room! Our course doors will be opening VERY SOON so be sure to get on our WAITLIST to receive emails about course doors opening, freebies, and therapy tips/tricks! We don't want you to miss out!