Preschool Soup Activities for Speech and Language

Preschool Soup Activities for Speech and Language

What makes a perfect accompaniment on a cold, winter’s day? A nice warm bowl of homemade soup!

Preschool Soup Activities for Speech and Language

 Photo Credit: Cayusa

There a few soup books I like to read with my preschoolers. My top three are:

Soup Day by Melissa Iwai

Stone Soup by Ann McGovern

Growing Vegetable Soup by Lois Ehlert

For today’s post I’m going to focus on the enjoyable book Soup Day.
Its illustrations are large, straightforward and nicely depict the bonding between a child and her mother. As a speech therapist I often use this book to target the following skills:

  • Categorization
    • Sort types of vegetables by color, size, or place where they are grown.
  • Sequencing
    • The order or steps to make soup. For instance, First, they select the ingredients at the store, next they…then they…finally they…
  • Rapid naming and recall
    • How many vegetables were in the soup? Can you remember?
  • Story retelling
    • This is related to sequencing but focuses more on narrative story telling skills which is a developing skill in most preschoolers.
  • Vocabulary
    • Names of different vegetables, pastas and seasonings.
  • Following directions
    • Follow directions on how to make soup.
  • Articulation and Phonology
    • Multiple opportunities to target the phonological process final consonant deletion (e.g. that pesky /p/ in soup!)

Other Educational Aspects:

  • This book may have a special place for adoptive or multicultural families as the little girl in the story is Asian and her mother is white. This is not the emphasis of the story, but it’s warming to see (especially since the adoption rate has steadily decreased) and can promote thoughtful discussions with your little ones. Reading and playing with our children, provides a safe context to discuss tolerance, acceptance, and love.
  • If you want to focus on some academic concepts Soup Day allows multiple opportunities to target numbers, the alphabet, shapes, and colors.

Extension Activities:

Make real soup! There is a recipe in the back of Soup Day or you can choose some recipes from the following kid friendly cookbook:

Play a  super fun cooperative board game like:

This is a hands on soup activity from Teach Preschool:

Stirring-up-alphabet-soup

If you want to focus on the alphabet you can use their suggested foam letters or you can replace them with foam vegetables like this:

Kimberly Scanlon, M.A. CCC-SLP is a speech language pathologist, an author and a mother. As the owner of Scanlon Speech Therapy, LLC, a unique boutique practice in Bergen County, Kimberly embraces individuality and treats the whole person. Her goal is to spread compassion, hope, and some speech, language and literacy tips one moment, one person at a time.  Her first book, My Toddler Talks: Strategies and Activities to Promote Your Child’s Language Development and her her second book, Learning to Read is a Ball are available for purchase at online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

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