2021 Update: Last year I wrote this post about Mother’s Day Activities as an SLP working through the craziest school year in my life. Fast forward to today – I quit my job and started a private practice. My blog posts these days are more family-centered. I hope you enjoy this post and take some time to look around!
Welcome to my site! I’m Kayla Calabro, a speech-language pathologist from New Hampshire. When our schools closed I felt so overwhelmed and wanted to find a way to simplify my work-life so that I had more time for my mom-life. To do that, I’ve been picking a small assortment of activities to use for my entire caseload. I work with elementary and middle-school students, so I try to find a healthy mix of activities that would be appropriate for first to eighth grade. This is my collection of Mother’s Day activities!
Mother’s Day Activities | Books
You are my Happy, by Hoda Kotb
I’m not crying… you’re crying! I love this book and plan to share it with my own little guy this week. There are some nice sequencing opportunities with this story as well as the carryover activity of making lists of what makes you happy. I like to use a predictive list for early writers and readers.
- I’m happy for Mom
- I’m happy for Dad
- I’m happy for …
I also heard some present progressive verbs that were ripe for modeling and recasting as past-tense verbs as needed.
Just Me and My Mom – by Mercer Mayer
Mercer Mayer’s “Little Critter” books are full of visual inferences. I plan to pause and ask inferencing questions as I watch this. I also have a couple young readers who will be watching this with me muted, so they can practice those extremely-important literacy skills!
Mother’s Day Activities | Videos
An Open Letter To Moms from Kid President
Happy Mother’s Day from Pixar
I love using Pixar Shorts for inferencing, sentence formulation, and even articulation. Having a shared context is really all you need. For more ideas, head over to my post about using film shorts in therapy.
Mother's Day Activities | Games
Mother’s day crossword from The Word Search
In all honesty, finding mother’s day games was like finding the “end meeting button” at the end of a tele-meeting. But I did find this crossword puzzle as well as this other one by Planet Oz Kids. I’m planning to have my students formulate sentences using the mother’s day vocabulary words. This will also be a good opportunity to teach some executive functioning skills.
“What strategy can we use to find the words? Should we look up and down or left to right? Should we look for the first letter or is there something special about this word that we can look for?”
Pretend-Play | Make Mom Food
I was thinking we could pretend to make a cake for Mom, thanks to PBS’s Make a Cake game. Personally, I would love a mother’s day cake! For Moms who like more savory dishes, the students can also make lunch on Fizzy’s Food Truck. This game has the student sequence making an order for a visitor. I really think this will pull out a lot of sequential vocabulary for my students, especially those who can’t use the remote mouse. They’ll have to explain what to do, which will be a fantastic language-rich activity.
Be well
I hope these Mother’s Day Activities help to make your life simpler and give you back some of the time you may have lost with this transition. I want you to know that I see you. You’re working your tail off to get the job done; exhausted and not fitting in the self-care that you need and deserve; laughing your butt off at your hilarious students. I feel you. We’re in this together and we can do anything.
Be well. Happy Mother’s Day to the Mom’s out there!
-Kayla
Looking for more activities? Try these.
- Bugs
- Camping
- Speech Therapy Activities
- Social Skills Videos
- Remote Learning Resources
- Teletherapy Resources