Fall acorns

Last week in therapy we continued with our fall theme.  Our speech therapist found these great acorn templates, and we did this activity with a fun twist.....

 

 



 

 

First, we had our students use a glue stick to glue the acorn template to a piece of brown construction paper.  Next, we used liquid Elmer's glue to squeeze glue on the top (shell) portion of the acorn.  We used a paintbrush, and with hand over hand assistance, we spread the glue (using terms related to what speech was working on...left/right, top/bottom, etc.). 

 



 

 

Now comes the fun part....to "paint" the top we used vanilla pudding.  We were thinking of different ways to make it easy for our Intellectual Disability students to apply the pudding.  I came up with using a "honey bear" bottle to shake and pour the pudding (the bear was a good size for our students to wrap their hands around)......It worked great!!  The opening at the top was big enough that it came out easily...not too much and not too little...and it didn't get clogged!    There was definitely extra so we had to shake the excess off. 

 

After each student applied their pudding we had them smell it from the bottle (this was good that it was in the bottle too....they couldn't get messy trying to touch it, and we only had to lightly press the bottle for the scent to come out).  Most of the students loved the smell!!

 

 

After each student had a turn with the pudding, we moved to the bottom of the acorn.  For this part we used coffee!  What a different smell for our kids.  Some of our older kids with a little more language were able to identify the coffee by the smell!  So cute!

 

 

 

 

For the language piece Denise used concepts like top/bottom, left/right, as well as colors we used to paint the acorns; brown/yellow. 

 

 

 

Finished Project!! 

 

 

I really like this project....it wasn't messy and the smell was a fun spin!  The speech therapist and I like to use materials to paint that are smell related for our students (as long as we make sure there are no allergies).  Some scents we use may be new to them, others they have smelled before! 

 

This was a fun activity that we modified for our students.  We kept the "painting" minimal and interesting by adding the scent aspect.  This activity was really easy too, because there weren't a lot of materials needed (many of which one of us had at home)!