Easter Egg Hunt Fun

We love those plastic Easter eggs at The Speech House.  There is not a more versatile and inexpensive therapy tool to be found!  I have been known to pull them out anytime during the year for a quick and fun therapy lesson.  Most of my ideas are pretty intuitive to anyone who has worked as an SLP for awhile.  But, if you are new, or a parent, who needs some ideas to get you started, here are a few ways to use them:

1. Classic Easter Egg hunt:  Fill eggs with candy, small toys, stickers, etc.  Hide them and have clients find them.  When it is time to open them, require a speech or language target such as a carrier phrase or sentence.  If working on /f/ sound, it could be, "I found a blue egg."  You can figure out a phrase for any target to require articulating prior to opening the egg. 

2.  Fill the eggs with small toys or pictures that represent speech targets: /b/ - bee, ball, baby, bug, bell, bow, etc.  After eggs are collected, open them up and tell what was found inside, make sentences with the targets, tell something about the item (to make a language task). 

3.  Get duplicates of all kinds of decorated eggs and work on matching "same" eggs.

4.  Have a variety of eggs to work on descriptive vocabulary.  I have eggs that are shiny, sparkly, pearly, spotted, striped, flowery, small, medium, large, etc.  I will ask the child to give me a sparkly orange egg and I will then fill it and put in the basket (receptive language).  Or I will have the child tell me which egg to choose (expressive language).

5.  I will hide the eggs completely out of sight and the child will have to follow my directions to find them.  This is especially good for working on positional concepts:  Look "behind" the desk, or "under" the pillow, or "between" the desk and the file cabinet...

6.  Play "hot" & "cold" to teach an abstract way of finding eggs.

7.  For social skills work, play "follow my eye gaze to find the hidden egg". 

8.  For older children, have "treasure hunts".  Follow clues to figure out where clues are hidden.  You can use riddles or descriptions:  "I am hiding in a dark and cold place.  The light comes on when you open the door.  I am beside some milk." (Refrigerator)

9.  For Social Groups, have the group work together to decipher the clues or have one child find one part of the clue and then they have to share their clues to figure out the location of the egg cache.  One way to do this is to write or draw the final location on tagboard, cut up into puzzle pieces and have each child earn a piece of the puzzle.

10.  For higher level students, let them figure out hiding places for eggs.  Then they have to write their own clues.  This can be tricky for some kids because they may have trouble with being too concrete or being too vague with their clues. 

I will add more ideas as they come to mind.  Readers please share your ideas too by adding them in the comments section.  I know there are many other ideas out there!

At The Speech House we are planning on having lots of egg hunts next week.  Since it is usually more fun to do in groups, we plan on having each therapist bring her client together with other clients to join in small hunts outside.