I’ll be honest you guys… these fall lesson plans product nearly killed me. I think it definitely took the longest to make of anything in my store! I enlisted help from both my brother and my boyfriend to make sure it was finished before I went on vacation… and it was! Phew! If you work with elementary aged students, this packet WILL save you time and help you have more fun in therapy this fall!
I’m pretty visual when it comes to checking out new products. If you are the same way, check out the video below! I show you through the product! I think it prints pretty beautifully if I don’t say so myself 🙂
If you’d rather see pictures, read on.
Themes for Preschool (and up!): August, September, October, & November
I love a good theme and my younger students do too. My young students get bored easily. When they get bored, they just try to make their own fun. And if I’m not prepared, then I get frustrated. And nobody is learning anything!
So we gotta make it fun! For my fall lesson plans, I like to combine a mix of traditional and unique themes. My product has books, crafts, and activities for the following themes, perfect for August, September, October, and November therapy and preschool (or young grades) activities!:
- Back to school
- All about me
- Apples
- Fall
- Leaves
- Fire prevention
- Pumpkins
- Squirrels and nuts
- On the farm
- Halloween
- Thanksgiving
- Football
How I Run My Fall Lesson Plans
When I use these fall lesson plans to run my sessions, I usually read the book and discuss any themes, vocabulary, WH questions, and comprehension questions first. Then we do an activity. Finally, we make the craft. This can take up to 3 sessions! For kids with limited attention, I might work on the craft and the activity in the same session, switching back and forth to keep things fresh.
Since I include two of everything for each theme, I usually will use one book, craft, and activity in therapy, and then tell parents about the other one so they can continue the fun at home! I’ve had quite a few therapists say these packets were perfect during distance learning because they were easy enough to send and do at home as well! All my crafts use simple, readily-available materials and are quick, so you don’t accidentally turn speech therapy into art class!
Fun Activities for the Fall
For each theme, there are two crafts, two activities, and two recommended books. These are fun activities for the fall months! The activity suggestions are open-ended so you can set the stage and then follow your child’s lead to make language therapy meaningful. For example, the All About Me theme overview page is shown below:
Then, there are follow up pages for all my fall lesson plans that explain each craft and each activity in depth, with ideas for how to target speech and language skills!
Of course, I’ve included any printables you need to do the crafts/activities shown. I include color and black & white options for all printables.
Many of the crafts and activities utilize mini articulation articulation or language cards, which are also included. The articulation mini cards contain 35 cards each for p, b, m, h, w, y, d, n, t, k, g, ng, f, v, ch, j, l, s-blends, s, z, sh, th, and r. All sounds have initial, medial, and final pages except: h, w, y (only initial), ng (only final), and r. The r section has a page for initial r, as well as 1 page each for air, ar, ear, er, ire, and or. Of note: the th and r pages contain only words, no pictures, in order to save ink! The language mini packet contains 35 cards targeting: verbs, adjectives, and core vocabulary. There are 6 additional pages of cards containing pictures to describe (e.g., categories, function), compare and contrast, etc.. .
Below is an example of a mini articulation card page for initial /z/:
And a mini language card page for verbs:
Aaaand one more thing! Did you notice how on the first All About Me page shown above that there were “Other” boxes at the bottom? I’ve made all 12 of those pages (1 for each theme) editable so you can type in the activities you own that you use for each theme!
To keep the fun and inspiration going all year long, I also made similar packets! You can read more about the winter packet here and the spring packet here, or you can find them on Teachers pay Teachers to purchase:
Or get all three together in a money-saving bundle:
Check out the back to school lesson plans product in my Teachers Pay Teachers store here! There are preview images and some pretty amazing reviews you can check out from other buyers.
{thanks for reading}
What a comprehensive product!! Back to school fun… I like to play a guess who game with my kids where they all write three facts about themselves and we post on the bulletin board… the other students make guesses… its fun and a good way to get to know each other =)
That sounds so fun!!
Such a nice, complete packet that would make planning for therapy sessions a breeze! At the beginning of the year, I always do a ‘get to know about me’ page and take a picture of each student. Then we put it up on a wall in my room, so the kids can see it and they love seeing what the other kids write. I also plan a fun ‘pirate’ themed unit for September and it gets the kids excited to come to Speech!
I love the idea of taking pictures of everybody!
Great packet! I try to bring in photos from my summer and talk about what I did. This often leads to the kids sharing too. It’s a fun way to work on listening, making comments, asking questions, sharing information and getting to know each other.
I always have so many ideas running through my head! I have a hard time narrowing them down. This year, I kept the first week pretty simple. I took baseline data and just spent time visiting with the kids about their summer.
What a fantastic product! I like to do a bingo game with different summer activities to get my kids talking about what they did over summer and get to know each other!
Good idea! You win!!! Send me an email at speechymusings@gmail.com and I’ll send over the product! Thanks for entering 🙂
I hang everyone’s birthday up on one of my bulletin boards, and we talk about our birthdays.
At the beginning of the year I love to have the kids draw pictures of what they did over the summer and describe it to the group.
At the beginning of the year I always use an All About Me theme paired with What I DId Over The Summer activity so that I don’t have to stress too much the first few sessions.
I like to do a language sample on my first day back, while the students draw a picture. After that, I use the picture as their “sticker chart”.
Great looking Fall packet! It would be a huge time saver. I’m looking forward to you other theme/craft packets. No pressure 😉
This would be great to add to my beginning of year materials! I like to show pictures and share about my summer and ask students what they did over the summer. I’ve also started using the SGM during our sharing!!
I started theme planning two years ago to make things easier at back to school time and it really does help (especially now that I’ve got materials for a lot of themes already printed out)! This year I’m spending one morning each week pushing in to a full day preschool classroom, and the teacher and I are planning theme based language and literacy activities for those mornings. These plans would be a great starting point for us!!
I always start my first day with some sort of craft with my students (this year it was decorating an “all about me” puzzle piece) while we chat about their summers. It also gives me an opportunity to see students one-on-one to collect some baseline data while the others in the group work on their craft.
I am actually a grad student and am always on the lookout for fun back to school ideas, tips, and tricks! This packet looks great! You make it look so easy! 🙂 Can’t wait to put all of my ideas & resources I’ve gathered into practice once I graduate 🙂 Thanks for creating this, and for all the great content on your blog! 🙂
I need this terribly! I’m not a very creative soul, but I’m really good at carrying out predetermined activities! I like starting with open-ended activities to see where their language is after summer. I also love using games they are used to (candyland, jenga, etc) and adapting those using great tpt products.
Wow, what an amazing looking product! I have been doing themes to help keep me organized and the kids interested. I also try to make copies of all worksheets/homework at the beginning of the month so I can just grab what I need out of my monthly folder.
This is so beautifully creative! This would be amazing to have as a CF while I’m starting out my first school year! To make back to school more fun I got large pieces of crepe paper (used for door decorating) and had the students lie down on a piece of paper and traced around them to make giant life-sized pictures of themselves. Then they decorated the picture with smaller pictures of their favorite things/facts about them and what they work on during speech.
I like to start off the year with decorating bookmarks. After the kiddos decorate them, I use the bookmarks as positive reinforcement/rewards. They get a sticker on their bookmarks whenever they have a good day in therapy. When the bookmark is filled with stickers, I will laminate the bookmark and return it to the student! This way we can all have a stress free conversation while crafting 🙂
This packet will help will help me stay very organized!
This looks like such a great product and a big time saver! Hoping you’ll make one for the other seasons too 🙂 The teachers at our school made a Back to School funny video for the kids and they loved it! It really got them and us excited to be back. The first week back I also have my students do some type of “Welcome Back” activity (draw a picture of their favorite thing about summer or I’ll have new students draw a picture of their family and share) and I also have them decorate their speech folders. That gets them more excited to take them home and bring them back 🙂
This looks lovely. I can only imagine the amount of work that goes into something like this. I am so grateful to people like you who create things like this and make them available to someone like me.
This product looks great! I’d love to have some basic plans in place for the first few months of school!
My first couple of weeks are all about building rapport while taking data. The students decorate folders for their speech work and complete “get to know me” activities while I also take baseline data. After that, I always do a pirate theme. This keeps the beginning of the year planning down to a minimum so I can tackle all the craziness that seems to pop up those first few weeks! 🙂
I work at an 11-month, residential school. I like to talk with my students about school activities and schedules then compare that with summer or home activities and schedules. We talk about how things are different and that’s not just okay but good!
Your lesson plans look fabulous!
As a cf slp with very little materials except for what I made in grad school, this packet would be so helpful! For my first week with the kids, we played a “get to know you” version of bingo but I used real bingo stamp markers that I had collected from my casino trips.
The kids loved it!