Rainforest Activities for Speech Therapy & Free Mini Book!

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Have you done any rainforest activities in your speech therapy sessions? It is seriously the best. I’m so excited to share some of the fun activities that we did with the rainforest theme!

One of the first things I did was make this big tree in a corner of my room…I just took some of the brown and green bulletin board paper and crumbled it up until it resembled a tree. This by itself got some attention, the students thought it was SO cool!

As we created new things, we added to it, so you can see the butterflies, sloths, and snakes that we made.

Crafts

The first craft I introduced was this snake, which is a super easy craft that the kids always love. I actually have done this craft a few years ago, so I knew it would be great to do it again. Just cut strips of paper and staple! I also wrote their speech words on each strip….it was perfect for /s/ blend practice!

The other crafts we did are included in this set…the blue morpho butterfly was probably our favorite! For articulation groups, I was able to give my kids the picture instructions (included in the download) and they could complete these independently while I worked with each student. A dream! For my language friends, we incorporated the crafts into what we were learning about each animal and work on following directions. They were so proud of the final products that I had a hard time convincing some of them to let their animals hangout in our classroom tree

Sensory Bin

Speaking of fun activities, this sensory bin was a huge hit with my little guys! All I did was grab a plastic bin and fill it with green and brown grass (from the dollar store), then add some bugs (dollar store), plastic trees (from the farm set I got at Walmart), artificial flowers (from a parent), and these rainforest animals I found on Amazon. This was a great language activity and reinforcer for articulation practice! They all wanted to get their hands in there

Text Activities

The Rainforest Grew All Around is like the infamous “The Green Grass Grew All Around”, and it was so much fun! The Great Kapok Tree is a classic that ties in really nicely with Earth Day and the themes of saving the rainforest, all while exploring the different animals living there. Another great one that I ordered and ended up not using as much as I thought was The Umbrella by Jan Brett. It has the familiar plot of The Mitten but is set in the rainforest. It also has lots of Spanish, so if you work with any Spanish-speaking bilingual students, this would be a great book for them!

We learned SO much using my Rainforest Non-fiction Language Unit! I got so much mileage out of these by working on comprehension, answering questions, writing sentences, vocabulary, etc. I couldn’t believe how engaged they were with these animal activities!

We even headed outside after reading about the Anaconda to measure how long it would be and drew one on the sidewalk! It happened to tie in great with the measurement they have been working on in math

Of course, I filled in the gaps with some other fun activities, like dot pages and game boards, from my Rainforest No Prep packet, which also was great homework this week!

If your looking at doing this theme with your students, I’ve bundled up all of my rainforest activities for you so you have everything you need AND you save a little bit!