Holidays like Valentine’s Day are a great way to introduce new vocabulary to build your child's language skills and understanding of traditions! Language skills are easy to incorporate into Valentine’s Day activities whether you are working on them at home or during speech-language therapy.

Valentine’s Day Bingo

Valentine’s Day Bingo is a fun way to work on many language skills including vocabulary, wh-questions (‘what’, ‘who’, ‘where’, ‘when’), pragmatic language, and sentence structure.Make your own bingo board.

 Heart Scavenger Hunt

Scavenger hunts can be fun and helpful for language development at the same time. Cut out heart shapes and put Valentine’s Day vocabulary words or targeted sounds for articulation on them.  Next, have your child go on a scavenger hunt looking for the hearts.  As he or she finds the hearts, have him or her formulate sentences with the words on the heart.  This is also a good opportunity to work on prepositions by having your child use prepositions to describe where he or she found the heart such as, “I found the heart under the chair!”

Cook Together

Cooking is a fun activity to do with your child and you can work on sequencing, following directions, and vocabulary at the same time. There are several recipes you can make for Valentine’s Day some of my favorites are chocolate covered strawberries and heart shaped cookies.

 Valentines

Making Valentines is a perfect opportunity to work on various language skills.  You can work on following directions (for example, “Put one red heart on the paper.”), prepositions (for example, “Put the heart under the red heart.”), and adjectives (for example, have the children request items for their valentine by adjective, “I need the big red heart.”).

Valentine’s Day Books

There are several books about Valentine’s Day that you can choose to read depending on the level of the child you are working with.  Some of my favorites include:

1. Where Is Baby’s Valentine by Karen Katz

2. The Night Before Valentine’s Day by Natasha Wing

3. Valentine's: Lift-a-Flap Board Book by Holly Berry-Byrd

4. Valentines Are For Saying I love You by Margaret Sutherland

5. Day it Rained Hearts by Felicia Bond.

As you read each story ask questions related to the book and have your child identify the objects in pictures.  This will also help improve vocabulary.

I hope you have a fabulous Valentine’s Day and enjoy these Valentine’s Day Activities! Additionally, feel free to contact In Home Speech Solutions if you have questions or concerns we can help answer.

Jennifer Price M.S., CCC-SLP Lead Speech-Language Pathologist & Owner