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October can feel like the month when everything lands on your desk—speech referrals, new transfers, endless meetings, and admin updates. With so much on your plate, there’s little time left to plan. That’s why I pulled together a list of Halloween speech therapy activities you can use with preschool and elementary students. These ideas are low-prep, engaging, and will help you bring a festive fall theme to your sessions without the stress.
One of the best to Halloween speech therapy activities to plan for your preschool and elementary students is with books!
When selecting Halloween picture books for speech therapy, look for titles that align with your students’ ages and goals. For preschoolers and early elementary students, books with repetition and simple sequencing are ideal. If you’re targeting comprehension, story retelling, or story elements, try books like “Creepy Carrots” by Aaron Reynolds. Below, you’ll find a list of the best Halloween picture books for preschool and elementary students—organized by grade level to make planning easier.
Big Pumpkin by Erica Silverman – Great for sequencing, retelling, and repeated refrains your students can join in on.
There Was an Old Mummy Who Swallowed a Spider by Jennifer Ward – Fun book for sequencing, rhyming, and vocabulary expansion.
Happy Halloween, Littler Critter by Mercer Mayer – Perfect for working on describing, perspective-taking and WH-questions.
Room on the Broom by Julia Donaldson – Ideal for teaching story elements, rhyming, predicting, and character traits.
The Little Old Lady Who Wasn’t Afraid of Anything by Linda Williams – Great for sequencing and describing actions, plus lots of opportunities for AAC core words like go, stop, put on.
Crankenstein by Samantha Berger – Fun for discussing emotions, perspective-taking, and making text-to-self connections.
Creepy Carrots by Aaron Reynolds – Perfect for inferencing, problem/solution, and cause/effect. Students can also practice summarizing and discussing character motivation.
The Hallo-Wiener by Dav Pilkey – Fun story for themes of friendship, bullying, and perspective-taking. Lots of opportunities for figurative language too.
Bone Soup by Cambria Evans – A playful twist on Stone Soup, ideal for teaching story structure, sequencing, and character interactions.
We have book companions, story maps, and Halloween speech therapy activities for Room on the Broom, Big Pumpkin and The Little Old Lady Who Wasn’t Afraid of Anything in the Themed Therapy SLP membership.
When working with mixed groups and varying ages, having some Halloween games for your speech therapy sessions helps with keeping kids engaged while practicing their flashcards or stimulus item. Here are some fun Halloween speech therapy activities with games to plan:
Love planning with themes but hate spending hours creating lessons? The Themed Therapy SLP Membership takes lesson planning off your plate so you can focus on your students. You can plan Halloween speech therapy activities with our full spiders-themed unit for Prek-5th or use our Halloween + Monsters mini-theme, packed with:
Planning your Halloween speech therapy activities has never been easier!
Need some fun Halloween speech therapy activities for your articulation and phonology goals? Grab a deck of articulation flashcards, you can easily turn them into fun Halloween articulation activities that keep students motivated while getting in high trials. Try these festive ideas:
Magnetic Wand Free Printable – Use this free Halloween articulation activity printable to hide pictures of candy or ghosts under the cards. When students pull a card, whoever gets the hidden picture might lose a turn, earn points, or take an extra turn.
Sticky Spider Web Game – Grab some sticky spider webs and a Halloween tablecloth. Stick articulation or language flashcards onto the web and let students see if their “spider” can snag a card with their “sticky web.”
Membership Bonus – Inside the Themed Therapy SLP Membership, you’ll also find ready-to-use Halloween articulation flashcards, plus verb and vocabulary cards for language targets.
Younger students love hands-on play, and you can easily adapt these Halloween speech therapy activities to work on articulation, phonology, and language goals:
Crafts are a hands-on way to keep younger students engaged while targeting speech and language goals. You can pair them with Halloween-themed books, work on sequencing the steps, and incorporate lots of vocabulary practice.
👉 Want more? Check out my full post on Halloween crafts for speech therapy.
A Halloween sensory bin is an easy way to keep students motivated while embedding practice into play. You can adapt it for articulation, vocabulary, and WH-questions.
Halloween Sensory Bin by Fireflies and Mud Pies – Put in random Halloween items, some skeleton hands, a cauldron and work on goals while exploring the bin!
