Celebrating Spring – Language Activities

Wendy Lee
Mar 20
3 min read

As I’ve been out and about over the past couple of weeks, I’ve felt very uplifted by the improving weather and beautiful sunshine! It certainly beats driving around in the wind and rain, and as an extra bonus, I’ve been able to spend time with children outside.

Spring Talk

Children are inherently curious and I’ve had some lovely conversations about mini beasts, new growth and what’s on the menu in the mud kitchen! I’ve been into schools with eggs and new chicks just hatched, which is such a privilege to see and brings out lots of communication in even the quietest of children. I’ve also been hearing about a potential butterfly garden in one school, which both I and the children were very excited about. The theme of spring is being covered in lots of our schools.

In our schools lucky enough to have access to forest school, communication between and with the children seemed to fill the air. Being outside and seeing new growth certainly provides us with some brilliant opportunities to build language.

Linking new Language to Learning

As I was working with teachers and support staff, we spoke about how it’s best for any language work we are doing as speech and language therapists to tie in with curriculum work. This has the advantage of building the language skills children need through some targeted support, then giving them lots of practice through their day-to-day interactions with adults and children. It links new language to learning as part of the curriculum and so feels like a power boost to the language work. Of course, the conversation with staff progressed to whether I had any Spring themed language activities!

Language Activities linked to Spring

Shared Reading

The first thing that came to mind was to suggest some shared reading linked to the Spring theme. Shared reading is a brilliant communication workout and allows us to use books as a conversation starter, building conversation, vocabulary and understanding through the pictures.

A couple of books that came to mind were the ones below… though I am sure there are lots of others. Some lend themselves beautifully to shared reading and others to a more traditional story time, which is also a good way for children to hear new language related to the topic.

Oliver’s Vegetables
One Springy Day
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
We’re Going On An Egg Hunt
Worms
The Extraordinary Gardener
Jaspers Beanstalk
Goodbye Winter Hello Spring
Lulu Loves Flowers
Bee And Me (Wordless)

Other Language Activities

We spoke about general activities, like

Going on a listening walk – listening to the spring sounds and other environmental noises – tuning children into the sounds around them.
Spring themed barrier games to support understanding and talking (see here for more information about barrier games).
Making a bug hotel – talking about materials, planning how to do it, talking about which bugs would like which spaces – so much opportunity for language.
Planting seeds – working through the sequence of planting seeds and retelling the sequence. Link it to one of the stories, like ‘Lulu loves Flowers’ where the character builds her own garden.
Making an obstacle course – moving in on and around things on an obstacle course like mini bugs – wriggle like a worm, crawl like a spider, flutter like a butterfly...
Creating a spring collage – finding pictures and sorting into categories which helps with word learning, maybe bugs and plants, and creating a collage together.
Taking photos of children doing simple activities, such as the planting or bug hotel activity and talking through the photos afterwards, creating a personal narrative together of their day.

Communication Workout

Talking about Spring themed activities afterwards in our central office, I was reminded by one of my colleagues of some activities we developed during the Covid 19 lockdown. We put together weekly activities we called a ‘Communication Workout’ and shared it with the schools we were working with.

Some did the activities with the vulnerable children in school, others shared them with parents to do at home. Some of our schools have combined them into activities they do regularly with their children who have SLCN to create some targeted language work following assessment and advice from our therapists.

I checked out our ‘Communication Workout’ back catalogue and there was a language activity linked to the Spring theme!

For early years, to build vocabulary

For key stage 1, focused on understanding

For key stage 2, to practice explaining

Our schools have given us lots of lovely feedback on our ‘Communication Workout’ so we thought we would share our Spring themed activities in case anyone wanted to have a go.

We’d love to hear your thoughts as well as how you tie in language activities to work the children are already doing in school – we find this such an impactful way to work, we’d love to hear any other examples.