Using holidays to encourage Conversation Skills

This post is all about helping kids generalize their language skills using something that all kids love...holidays!  Talking about upcoming holidays is a great way to help kids solidify their newfound language skills because:
1. Holidays are super motivating for kids, they are fun!
2. Holidays are very high frequency topics in the weeks proceeding each major holiday.
3. Holiday conversations often are repetitive and predictive...talking about Halloween, well then expect to be asked what you will dress up as, talking about Christmas, expect to be asked what you have asked Santa for, etc.

So I take full advantage of the holidays when they roll around.  Having a private practice helps because then I don't have to worry about crossing some blurry school vs. church topic line.  I ask parents beforehand and go with what they generally talk about.  I LOVE working directly with parents.

These are some of the big goals that I work on in our conversations:
 topic maintenance if we are talking about Halloween let's stay there for a few minutes and not jump around to Star Wars or Cars II.
 conversational turns are we both sharing the talking time, is my client giving answers and asking questions, etc.
 ability to answer wh-questions and ask wh-questions this is a big one, in therapy it is easy to work on  answering wh-questions but harder to find spontaneous opportunities to ask them.  The basically scripted holiday conversation routines everyone uses are great for that.
eye-contact is the student engaging in appropriate eye-contact, especially when requesting information?
and other conversation level grammar and speech sound goals (using correct pronouns, correct helper verbs or conjunctions, verb tenses, /k/ sounds, etc.)

and the best part...these are conversations that have a huge likelihood of being taken outside of the therapy session time so the students can practice and apply the skills we have been working on to help them interact with peers.