Paint Chip Turkeys

For the past two weeks, I’ve made paint chip turkeys with a good majority of my groups. I found the original idea here, but didn’t want to work on “I’m thankful for…” with my groups. Instead, we targeted artic, Wh- questions, pronouns, comparing/contrasting, yes/no questions, absurdities, regular past tense verbs, social skills, and sequencing. Yes, all of that, sometimes 3-4 things in one session, all with one cute (almost free) craft!

My co-SLP and I raided the paint sections at both Home Depot and Lowe’s. We grabbed a ton of different shapes, sizes, and colors. Here’s our loot before we started.

I cut the wide paint chips into 3 long strip, to make them look more like “feathers”. (The funny shaped ones, that actually look like a feather, came from Home Depot, by the way!)

To target a variety of speech/language goals, I went through my Super Duper “Fun Deck” books. I have all four at my school, so it was easy to go through them and find a target for each student. For the artic kids, I used my Jumbo Webber Artic Drill book. To make the papers fit onto the feathers, I put the page(s) I wanted on the copy machine and shrunk them to 50%. They may be difficult for you to see, but I promise it won’t be an issue for your students (with the exception of any vision problems, obviously).

I cut out the pertinent information into little boxes for each student. The student above is working on answering wh- questions given 3 choices. Some students were shown a picture and asked to label the verb, insert the correct pronoun, compare and contrast the pictures, etc. The Fun Deck worksheet books covered EVERYTHING that I needed!

verbs and when questions

more when questions

absurdities and answering yes/no questions

It was a great way to work on following directions, too. Once our feathers were complete, I had the students put some glue on the bottoms of their paint chips and put it on the back of a brown circle I had cut. This was difficulty for some, so I drew an “X” on the bottom and had the student “put the glue on the X.” For the turkey’s face, I had students use Sharpie markers to draw an upside-down yellow triangle for the beak and an upside-down red heart for the waddle. I used googley-eyes, too. Then we did stick-figure legs on the bottom. Some students chose to get creative and draw wings on their turkeys, too. We had the students describe their turkeys’ faces using adjective+noun phrases (i.e. yellow triangle & red heart). It also worked on features of animals: beak, waddle, eyes, legs, feathers.