There are specific themes that most preschools or kindergartens seem to do every year. One of them is apples. Here are some apples push-in therapy ideas. Oh, and these work well in preschool classrooms. If you would like like a handout of these and other apples push-in therapy ideas, click here.
Water Table
Target: increasing sentence length, use of verbs, prepositions, sharing, negotiating with peers, following directions, describing and plurals.
Equipment: various measuring cups, spoons, apples (different sizes and colors if you can), and baskets that can get wet. You can also use real apples.
To Play:
- At the start of play, have the children help by setting up the water table/bin.
- Have the children put the different equipment on the water table.
- Have children pretend to make apple pie or catch apples with the cups and spoons. If they are catching apples, have them talk about how many apples they caught and if the apples are different sizes and colors, have the children describe what kinds of apples they caught.
Free Play
Activity One: Baking Pies
Target: Play skills, use of verbs, increase sentence length, spatial concepts
Equipment: play in a play kitchen if possible, pie tins or tart shell tins, play apples, bowls, spoons, rolling pin, play apples (you can use red paper balls as apples), circle of felt or paper that covers the pie tins or tart shell tins as the top pie crust, empty spice jars.
To Play:
- Have children pretend to bake pies.
- Let them roll out the dough, put the apples in the tins and “shake spice” on the pie and lastly, cover the top of the pie and if you have a play oven, have the kids put them in and take them out when they are “done.”
- Use a fork and pretend to eat your pies.
- Talk about if you like the taste.
They can also hand out “pies” to their friends and “eat” them together.
Activity Two: Picking Apples
Target: In/out/off, play skills, use of verbs, increase sentence length.
Equipment: Some pictures of large trees. You can make them with green and brown poster paper, flat paper apples (you can make them in different colours and sizes), paper apple blossoms, bees, baskets.
To Play:
- Stick the trees to a wall. You can stick either the apples or the apple blossoms on the tree.
- If you put up apple blossoms, give the bees to the children and pollinate the flowers.
- Encourage them to make buzzing noises.
- As the children pollinate the flowers, take the flowers off and put up an apple. You can have children take down the flowers.
When the apples are up, the children can pick the apples and put them in the baskets. You can then take the apples out of the basket and count them. Talk about the colour and size of the apples. Pretend to eat the apples.
Child-Directed Art
Target: increasing sentence length, increase use of verbs, increase use of spatial concepts, sharing, negotiating with peers.
Equipment: white paper, apple stamps (stamps made from apples), red paint, paintbrushes, green leaves from construction paper, glue, glitter (optional), apple stickers,
Activity:
- Give every child a piece of white paper and lay out the rest of the art supplies.
- Let children make a picture out of the art supplies. Remember: This is about the process and not the product.
These have been popular and flexible enough to target a wide variety of goals, and the kids generally love them. If you are looking for more ideas, here is a blog post about using The Apple Pie Tree by Zoe Hall in therapy (click here).
If you are looking for more apples related ideas check out these other block posts from talented SLPs
If you are looking for more Apples themed freebies, check these out.
What are your favourite apple activities?