Holidays and special occasions may look a little different this year, including Halloween. However, that doesn’t mean it can’t be a fun day spent with your children!

Here are some ways to incorporate speech and language into your Halloween!

Building Descriptive Vocabulary

Halloween is the perfect time to build on these vocabulary skills. Think of all the descriptive words we can use when talking about Halloween.

• Pumpkins: biggest, smallest, round, short, tall, long, hard, bumpy
• Costumes: funny, silly, scary, beautiful, detailed
• Candy: one/many/all, sweet, sour, crunchy, soft, gooey, yummy, yucky, salty, round, square, hard, soft

Sequencing and Narrative Skills

Sequencing and narrating events can be very useful for children to hear. When children hear and learn the sequence of the activity (like carving a pumpkin or going trick-or-treating) this can help them to know what comes next. It can also let them know how long each step may take. It can even decrease chances of unwanted behavior (i.e. if your child doesn’t like scooping out the seeds in the pumpkin but loves to carve it. By letting them know the steps of carving a pumpkin, your child knows that as soon as they scoop out the seeds, they can carve the pumpkin!).

When carving pumpkins, you may have a conversation around ‘first, we will cut the top off; second, we will dig out the seeds; third, we need to draw the pattern on the pumpkin; and last, I will help out carve your pumpkin.’

Be sure to use words like “first/then”, “first/second/third”, “first/then/last.”

Modelling Past and Future Verbs

While doing various Halloween activities, remind your child what you did together and what is coming next.

-Trick-or-treating: We went to brown house; next we will go to the blue house.

-Pumpkin carving: We scooped out all the seeds, now we are drawing on our pumpkin, then we will carve it.

Answering “WH“ Questions

While reading spooky stories or watching a Halloween movie you can ask your children various “Wh” questions. Questions may include: “where are the kids in the movie going?” “How are they feeling walking through that haunted house?” “Who is the main character going to dress up as for the Halloween party?”

These are a few simple tricks to incorporate more language into your Halloween activities!  Happy Halloween! Enjoy time with your children while you carve pumpkins; get dressed up; eat candy; and look out for spooky things!!!!

Morgan Zenner, Wildflowers Registered Speech-Language Pathologist