I have seen this little idea for fine motor all over Pinterest. I said to myself, “Self, that’s pretty darn cute. I need to make that for my toddlers and young preschool clients. I know I can use it in speech therapy.” So that’s what I did! Of course, I went to my favorite Dollar Tree to buy all my supplies…all $4 of it!

I have to admit when I made this little activity, I had no idea the language I was going to gather from it.  Do you ever plan a craft or game for therapy and then, during therapy, have waves of genius hit you?!  That’s what happened here!

First, I found a strainer (not super happy with this one but it worked great).  I really wanted a green strainer but oh well!  I picked bright spring colors for my flowers.  I cut the flowers from the stem so that they were all individual stems.

How to Use in Speech Therapy

1. Requesting:  Have all of the flowers on floor beside the strainer.  Have the child request a flower to “plant.” I have kiddos of varying ages and abilities so requesting may go from “more flowers” to  “pink flower please” to “May I have the pink flower?”
2. Color Labeling:  This one is pretty simple and can go with requesting above.
3. Color Identification:  Place all flowers in the strainer.  Tell the child to pick a “purple flower” to work on identifying colors.
4. Articulation Reinforcement:  Child can “plant” a flower each time he produces a target word correctly 5x.
5. Regular Past Tense Verbs:  As the child “plants ” a flower, he can say “I PLANTED a purple flower.”  Or, if all the flowers are planted, he can say “I PICKED a white flower” as he pulls the flowers out of the strainer.
6. Spatial Concepts: “In” like “The flower is IN the ground” and “out” like “the flower is OUT of the ground” are starters to work on spatial concepts.  As the child plants the flowers, he can work on “beside” or “next to.”  He can tell you “the white flower is BESIDE the pink flower.”
7. Categories:  Once all the flowers have been picked, group the flowers according to color or type.

So this cute little activity that has been floating around Pinterest as a fine motor activity has also become a great language activity!  Now grab your $5 dollar bill and head to Dollar Tree!

Need more flower ideas?  Check out my theme unit review!

Here’s the “Flower Power” packet of speech and language activities from my Tpt store!