Olympic Medal Craft for Speech Therapy
The Olympics are a natural way to bring excitement, movement, and motivation into speech and language learning. For young children, hands on activities paired with meaningful interaction create ideal opportunities for building communication skills.
An Olympic medal craft is an easy, engaging activity that works well in both clinical sessions and home routines.
Materials:
Thin cardboard such as a cereal or snack box
Aluminum foil
Markers or crayons
Ribbon or string
Scissors for adult use
How to Create the Medals:
Cut three circular shapes from cardboard.
Make a small hole at the top of each circle.
Wrap each circle with aluminum foil.
Color one medal gold using a yellow marker, one bronze using a light brown marker, and leave one silver.
Thread ribbon or string through the hole so the medals can be worn around the neck.
This simple preparation results in a highly motivating prop that children enjoy using during play and structured activities.
Using the Craft to Support Communication Skills
This activity can be easily adapted to target multiple speech and language goals for children between two and five years of age.
Building Vocabulary
Introduce and model words related to the Olympic theme such as medal, gold, silver, bronze, race, fast, slow, win, and first place. You can also expand descriptive vocabulary by talking about how the medals look and feel, using words like shiny, heavy, big, and special.
Supporting Longer Sentences
The medals provide a natural context for modeling and expanding children’s utterances to support growth in sentence length. Adults can model phrases such as:
“I am wearing the gold medal because I ran very fast.”
“I want to win the race so I can get first place.”
“You worked very hard and now you have a shiny silver medal.”
“It is your turn to run and then you can choose a medal.”
Children who are using shorter phrases can be supported through gentle expansion. For example, if a child says “gold medal,” an adult can model “You have the gold medal.”
Practicing Following Directions
The activity can also be used to target receptive language through simple directions such as:
“Put the bronze medal on and then sit down.”
“Give the gold medal to your friend and clap your hands.”
Targeting Speech Sounds
Specific sounds can be practiced within meaningful words and phrases. For example, G can be targeted in words such as gold and go, S in silver and slow, and B in bronze and big.
Why Simple Activities Are Effective
Hands on crafts combined with play based interaction support language learning by creating natural opportunities for modeling, repetition, and shared attention. Activities like this also make it easy for families to continue practicing skills at home, which supports carryover beyond therapy sessions.
Please contact Clearway Speech today with any questions you may have.