It’s spooky season! What Halloween activities does your preschooler enjoy? Trick or treat, Halloween crafts, scaring people? Here you’ll find Halloween activities for preschoolers with a speech therapy twist.

Halloween activities pair well with learning new sounds, words and phrases in an exciting and fun way. Many Halloween activities for preschoolers include an element of surprise and anticipation.

Follow your child’s lead by watching what they’re interested in, waiting, and listening. This helps your child explore the interaction with you and the language that is meaningful for them. 

Related Post: Child-Led Play

5 Halloween Activities for Preschoolers

Incorporating Halloween activities in speech therapy sessions is lots of fun! Here are some Halloween activities for preschoolers with ideas to support their speech and language development.

1 – Witch’s Brews and Fairy Potions

Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble. Does your child like making brews and potions? Playing with water or foam? Creating brews and potions can be a magical, sensory experience for everyone. Even if it gets a bit messy! Follow your child’s lead and allow their imagination to soar. 

Related Activity Post: Water Play with Speech and Language Goals

Start by going on a hunt to find all the things you need to make your potion. This may include Halloween-themed toys such as spiders, eyeballs, or bones. You might find things in the garden like leaves, pine cones, or dirt. Other options are spices, food colouring, glitter, or bath bombs.

There are many opportunities to model a variety of words when looking for all the ingredients you need. This includes labelling, categorising, describing and predicting what might happen next.

Once you’ve got all the things you need, toss them into a pot or cauldron with water, bubbles or foam. You could include measuring and cooking equipment, like measuring cups, pipettes, funnels, sieves, whisks and spoons in your play. 

Halloween Potion Recipes

You can be as creative as you like with Halloween potions. Here are six Halloween potion recipes to get you started. Please supervise your children when mixing and making potions.

You may need –

2 – Halloween Playdough

Does your preschooler enjoy playing with playdough? Halloween playdough is one of my favourite Halloween activities for preschoolers. It creates many opportunities to model a variety of words, phrases and language structures.

Find some speech therapy ideas related to playdough in this related post about linking language with playdough

Try this homemade pumpkin spice playdough recipe this Halloween. It’s easy to make and smells fantastic.

Once you’ve made or bought your Halloween playdough, grab some Halloween-shaped cutters. Create a spooky garden full of spiders, ghosts and witches.

3 – Pumpkano Halloween Activities

Have you tried Pumpkanoes? It’s a spooky twist on the classic volcano experiment. This is one of my favourite Halloween activities as it builds anticipation, and incorporates science and sensory play.

Find a variety of speech therapy ideas in this Halloween activity post.

4 – Halloween Slime

Sticky and stretchy Halloween activities to try are Halloween slimes. They’re great for hiding Halloween critters, glitter and surprises. It’s also fantastic for modelling action words like pull, push, stretch, and find.

Try this easy Halloween slime recipe here. You’ll also find speech therapy ideas to include when making and playing with slime together.

5 – Dressing Up

Halloween offers a unique opportunity to dress up and take on the role of someone else! This encourages creativity, remembering events, and engaging in fun interactions. Include these speech therapy ideas when dressing up this Halloween.

Describing your Characters

When choosing your Halloween costumes, label and describe what you’ll look like (e.g., black hat), the personality of that character (e.g., scary), associated words (e.g., broom) and action words (e.g., fly).

Role Play

Role play helps with trying new sounds, pitches, volumes, intonations, greetings and scripts. For instance, if your preschooler is dressed as a superhero, you could model “I’ll save you.” They could use this phrase when pretending to be a firefighter or a knight. If you’re a scary witch, you could try evil laughs and witch’s cackles.

Sequence the Steps of Getting Dressed

Talk through each step while your preschooler is dressing up in their Halloween costume. For example, “first put on your leggings, then your witch’s dress…. next, put your witch hat on.”

This post was about Halloween activities for kids and linking them with speech therapy areas. Which Halloween activities are you going to try during this spooky season?