DIY Thanksgiving Speech Trees

It was craft day today in the speech room.  We got out the crayons and scissors and made a cutesie little  Thanksgiving speech tree.  It came out awesome, if I may say so myself.  I showed it to our secretary, and she even wanted to set out in the front office to give our little speechies some recognition.  :)

Here is a fun tutorial on how to make one of your own.  You may have seen the "thankful trees" around the internet.  If not, check out this one or this one.  Well, I thought it'd be fun to make one speech and language style!

It turned out super cute, but I can't believe I forgot to take a picture of the final product!  Ugh!  I'll post an update tomorrow with the final picture.  :)

**Update!  Here is a pic of the final product!

To make the tree you'll need:

• a clay or plastic pot
• some branches (I just grabbed mine off of a tree in my back yard)
• a piece of foam small enough to fit inside the pot
• some tissue or paper of some sort (I used packing paper)

First, place the foam inside the pot and fit the branches in the foam.  I used an extra piece of foam that came in a package I had lying around the house.  To make it extra sturdy you could squirt some hot glue on the bottom of the branches before sticking them in the foam.  

Arrange the branches how you like them.  Then place balls of tissue or paper in the pot to hide the foam and secure the branches.  Tada!  The tree is done!

To decorate it, I found some leaf coloring pages online (I think I got it from abcteach).  The kids colored the leaves and wrote Thanksgiving words that had their sound in them.  I had them think of their own words if they could, but had word lists handy in case they needed help.

You can grab the coloring sheet that I used as well as Thanksgiving word lists broken up by sound {HERE}.

After they colored them, they cut out the leaves and helped me punch a hole in them.  We then slid a piece of string through the hole and tied to secure it.  The whole time they were working, we talked about Thanksgiving and made sentences with our words...plenty of opportunity to use our correct speech!

With my preschoolers, I used the leaves for basic concepts and following directions.  "Find the big leaves."  "Color the small leaves orange."  I also used the leaves to ask some WH questions.  "Where do we find leaves?" 

Whenever the kiddos finished, we hung the leaves on the tree!!  The had a lots of fun with this.

What do y'all think?  What else could y'all do with a speech tree?  Let me know if you try it! :)