What Is This? A Describing Activity

It's that time of the school year.  If you are like me you have been using many of the same therapy activities to target your goals.  Your kid's are getting tired of the same old Super Duper cards and quite frankly you are too! If this sounds familiar, then this post is for you.  I tried an activity called What is this? in therapy recently and it was a big hit. The idea originally came from childcareland, but I adapted it to work on describing.  

On the outside of the folder is a clue. Read this to the child without showing him/her the picture.  If they have trouble guessing show them the clue in the "window."  Last you can reveal the main picture in the folder.

This is great game because you can model the ways to describe the pictures (i.e, colors, animal/person, what it does, how it tastes etc.) and then give the child a chance for you to guess.  Here is the printable document I created for this activity, sorry there are no pictures to go with.


The other tool I have been using when working on describing is the Texture Hand.  I found this on good ol' Pinterest, but linked me to Mrs. Bainbridge's Class who has the pdf of the hand for FREE.  I have found that it really helps kids with describing how something feels and is also great because it gets their tactile senses involved in language.  

You really can use whatever you have around the house, but here is what I used for the different textures.


1. Soft: cotton ball (you can see that it has already gotten a lot of love :)
2. Smooth: wrapped part of a Ziploc bag around card stock
3. Rough: sandpaper
4. Hard: glass stone (one of those stones you put at the bottom of a fish bowl)
5. Bumpy: sticker (I happened to have a sticker with raised letters on it)


Like I said anything works and the main point is teaching the meaning of the word so that they can use it when they are describing objects.      


Well I hope this gets your creative juices flowing!  I know these ideas helped spark some language in my therapy room.  How are you all working on describing in therapy?