The Autism Helper's free Build-a-Turkey activity has four difficulty levels, from simple shuffling to reading body-part labels. It works on iPads for speech therapy, small groups, or whole-class instruction, takes 10 minutes, and needs no prep.
Student engagement in November and December can be super tricky. You need something fast, fun, and something that will keep everyone's attention. Don't worry, I've got you covered, and the best part is it's free. Let me show you. This Build a Turkey game from The Autism Helper is perfect for individual, small group, or whole group learning. Um, I used to do something very similar, but we would cut out pieces, and I would do this with my SLP in a speech group. And so I was so excited to see this because it has 4 different games and 4 different sorting and matching activities. I want to walk you through each one. Like I said, this is free. It's just something that Autism Helper is giving away, so I'm sure that you will find something perfect for your learners. Um, the first one is a building game, and this building game is really, really simple. You just push the button to shuffle and the turkey builds itself as it goes. And so you can talk about each piece of the turkey as it is going, and you can talk about how it matches, but it even gives you tips on what to do. So let's say that that's too easy for your learners, you need something a little bit more complex. Go to the easy drag and drop. Again, you shuffle and then students match the parts. They just drag it over and create the turkey as it goes. How fun is that? And these pieces completely move around, so if you stick them in the wrong place, it's no big deal. Again, they give you nice great tips. Then you've got an intermediate version as well. This one's a little bit more tricky. It's got different varieties of feathers, so you really have to use those discretion skills. And then of course you've got the complex version. There's multiple eyes, multiple feathers, and it will just tell you the body part. So you have to read the word or say the word and then choose which one you want and bring it over. So fun. Couldn't you see this in a speech group session? Such a great way to be able to, you know, really work together with those professionals in your classroom, or even just one-to-one, something fun, a time filler, or even just a social group. If you've got students who are looking to do things a little bit more independently, there's a sorting game. So here I'm going to put the stripes in, here I'm going to put the polka dots. So as I pull those over, they can just build that turkey as you go. And then to show you the easy matching, we're going to make the turkey look like this. So you're not going to push anything here, you're just dragging and dropping and creating the turkey to look identical to this guy, and you only have the exact number of pieces on this one, so it's really, really simple to be able to build. You can really work on getting it just right. Isn't this fun? It's a great reinforcement activity. Oh my gosh, the students in my class would absolutely love this. Oh, I'm gonna stay in full screen. Thank you, iPad. Um, and then I'm gonna go to intermediate here. So here it's gonna be a little bit more complex, right? I've got some distractors in here. If you look at my turkey, there's all polka dots, no stripes. So I don't need that one. My eyes, I have to choose the right version. I have to choose the right color glasses. So that's gonna be intermediate. Um, and then of course there's a complex version as well. Here's that complex version. You know, again, I've got different varieties. You can see this is actually a little bit darker than the one that I need, so I'm gonna have to be moving some things out of the way, choose the right version. A lot more pieces, a lot to be able to dig through to make sure that I have the right pieces to be able to build that model. What a perfect activity. Has something for everybody. It's so simple, so easy to use, no prep. No prep. So if you have an extra 10 minutes, it's the perfect thing to be able to pull up. You could do this individually, you could do it together, you could do it in a speech session, you could do it with your child. If you are a parent and you're like, man, I need a fun activity to be able to play a game, practice turn-taking, you could just pick one of those on the way to Grandma's house for Thanksgiving. Pull that up. You've got a speech client, you need a quick activity because they finished quick, guess what? Pull that up. Talk about all the different turkey body part stripes. Salads, you're categorizing, you're doing all of the things, and it's all free. So if you use this, drop us a comment below, let us know about it, tell us how you're using it and how it worked for your learner. We cannot wait to hear from you.
