Speech pathologists treating speech sound disorders will no doubt want some tips and ideas for correcting a lisp in speech therapy. Many different speech errors are addressed in articulation therapy, and correct production of s and z requires some skill and hard work to accomplish. While your coworkers and the internet may offer good advice,
Looking for a cheap, easy to use therapy material? How about paper bags? I love using paper bags for a variety of activities. Here are some simple ways I have incorporated paper bags into my therapy sessions. 1. Puppets My students love to use puppets to "eat" their articulation cards or other target cards. They also love to use them to tell stories. Making puppets from paper bags is a great, inexpensive way to engage your students in a variety of activities! You can easily make a puppet to match any book or story that you are using. Be creative- your kids will love it! I made these monster puppets with my son this week. They were so easy to make! We used a little paint, glue, and card stock with our paper bags. I found the idea for these cute monsters from this pin: Paper Bag Monster Puppets 2. Describe It To Me This activity is also super easy. I throw a bunch of items into a bag. My students reach in and grab something (no peeking!) to describe. The students remove the object and then describe it using a variety of descriptors. This is a great way to incorporate your Expanding Expression Tool (EET) with describing real objects. Sometimes I will even get really small, cheap objects that the students can keep if they give me a description using all of the beads on the EET. 3. What is in the bag? This is a great activity to work on a student's deductive reasoning skills. I put an object into the bag (students do not see- again, no peeking). Students need to ask questions about my object. This is similar to the game Headbanz. 4. Categories Place pictures of categories on the bag and collect items or pictures to place in each category. I used pictures from my Category Sorting activity. I like to put a piece of Velcro on each bag so that I can interchange the categories without having to get a new bag each time. 5. Collect in a bag Put any kind of card into the bag. My students love to decorate a bag and then collect their cards. 6. Paper bag books You can use two paper bags to make a book that will have two pockets. Simply fold two bags in half and then put the two openings touching each other to make two pockets for a book. Staple together, and done! You have a paper bag book that you can use to target a variety of goals. I used this one to put some of my new sequencing cards in for a student to take home. I have also made these Articulation Paper Bag Books. These are so fun to make with students and send home! Here is a link to a freebie that contains blank frames to use on your paper bags, as well as labels for What is in the bag? and Describe It To Me. Have fun using your paper bags!
We’ve all been there. After months of drill and practice and tongue depressors, he’s finally got his /r/ sound! He can say it in words, in phrases, even sentences and short conversations. You’re thinking he’s definitely on his way out the door with a “graduation” certificate soon. Then you see him in the hallway. He grins […]
Hey busy SLP! Ever find yourself in a therapy rut or in need of some articulation activities ASAP? I’ve got you covered! This post is full of 12 quick and easy articulation activities to help you achieve as many target trials as possible, without resorting to the ever-tedious drill, drill, drill! Articulation Activitie
Biggest hit in therapy so far this semester? Elephant and Piggie books! And it’s no surprise! These books are great. Wanna know why? Read on. 1) Kids LOVE these books. In my experience, they request them over almost all other books. 2) Elephant and Piggie books are easy to read. There are few words per […]
Do you ever have days where you know exactly what you need to target, but are just looking for a different way to do it? I know I have had many days like that, especially when working on articulation. My first year in the schools, I know that I was so frustrated with the monotony (to me at the time) of working on articulation, that I wasn't sure I even wanted to do the job anymore! With my crazy caseload now, I have gotten over the feeling that articulation work is monotonous, and now embrace the time I have with my students working on articulation. We can have so much fun together! So, you may ask, how did I get over the feeling of monotony? Well, I made a deal with myself that I would try to change things up. I would take items that I already had and use them as reinforcing activities during articulation work. Here are ten activities that really work for me: 1. Go Fishin- This is a game that I had in my speech room, and every time I had it out for my preschool population, my older students would see it and want to play too. So, I changed it into a way to use it for articulation work. I wrote numbers on the bottom of each fish, so that each time my students catch a fish, they have to say their word or sentence that many number of times. If I could do this again, I would start with higher numbers (I did 1-4) to get more productions. 2. Making Progressive Sentences- My kids think this is hysterical. We start with one articulation card and make a sentence. "I see a soccer player." Then, we add a card and add to our sentence. "I see a soccer player eating a sandwich." Then, we add even more! "I see a soccer player eating a sandwich with Santa." 3. Chipper Chat- This is my one go to item that is fun for all ages. My students LOVE to pick up the chips with the magnetic wand. Students roll the dice and say their word or sentence the number of times on the dice. Then, they get chips to put on their board. When they fill up the board, they can take the chips off. Sometimes, I have students start with all of the chips on the board and take that number of chips off the board. I use the set from Super Duper Inc., but there are lots of different magnet chip boards that you can find on Teachers Pay Teachers. If you don't buy the Chipper Chat set, you can find a bingo magnet and chips at a store like Wal-Mart or Target. I have even seen them at the dollar store occasionally. 4. Paper Clips on Articulation Cards- This works great with the chipper chat magnet wands. Just put paper clips on your articulation cards, and the kids can go fishing for cards. I like to put the cards face down so that the cards are a "surprise" each time. 5. Memory- Ok, I'm sorry, but really, my kids of all ages still LOVE to play memory! I try not to play it too often so it doesn't wear out it's welcome though. 6. Paper Bag- Put cards in a paper bag and pull them out. Try to guess what you will get before you pull it out. If you guess correctly, you get to keep it. First person to guess all of their cards correctly wins. Some kids have a really eerie ability to do this! 7. A Good Book- I love to take a good book out for students and try to find words that start with their sound. I pull out a piece of paper and we write down all of the words that have their sound. I love when I can have them bring books from class for this so that they may think about those words again during reading groups with their teacher. 8. Categories! I have students pick a word from their articulation cards and tell me the category of the item. We create piles of different categories and see how many different piles we can make. Students have to say their word in a sentence, "A sandwich is an food." I love this activity because students get both articulation and language benefits. 9. Guess the Item- I describe the articulation word to the student and see if they can guess the word I am describing. 10. Articulation Recall- We roll the dice to see how many cards the student has to recall. I then present that number of words to the student and give them a moment to memorize them. Then, we flip them over face down and see if the student can recall each word before flipping it back. There you have it! Whether you are just starting out or a seasoned veteran, hopefully some of these ideas will help you to cut the monotony and put more fun in your articulation sessions.
When it comes to eliciting sounds that a child is not stimulable for, /k/ and /g/ can be tricky because they are hard to see. That said, I h...
Oral Motor Exercises for Children, skills refer to the appropriate functioning and use of the facial muscles lips, jaw, tongue, cheeks etc.
Smarty Ears Technologies: Technology Solutions for Speech Therapy, Special Education Support and Services
Having troubles getting your students to produce the /r/ sound? Here are some tips that I have found helpful in teaching this stubborn sound.
I have a few kids who need to work on possessive nouns, pronouns and have/has. So many of my materials don't have pictures that go with the sentence, which can be confusing for some of my students. When I saw this clip art, I had to make a possessives unit with pictures that correspond to each sentence. Check it out on TPT! This unit has a total of 124 cards and can easily be used with any activity or game in your therapy room! The possessive noun / pronoun cards have fill in the blanks that can used for either one depending on your therapy targets. This works for every sentence in this section, since we all spend so much of our valuable time cutting and laminating materials, I wanted these cards to do double duty. There are 12 cards each of girls and boys to provide equal practice when you are working on pronouns. Their and theirs have separate cards, with 12 each. Theirs is pictured above. Their uses the same pictures with different sentences. For the its cards, you will have have your students add "The" when working on possessive nouns so the sentences make sense with both words. Has and Have have 32 cards for each. Most cards working on people, other with animals and objects pictures. Boys and girls are equally represented, with the girls cards pictured below. Example of have cards: If you have kids working on possessives make sure you check out this activity in my TPT store! Remember to like me on Facebook, I'm doing a flash freebie when I get to 100 likes!
I am constantly on the hunt for any fun ways to get my students excited about therapy, especially articulation. I have a love/hate relationship with articulation therapy. There is so much room for creativity when planning your sessions, but the games and crafts can get old quick. (This post contains Amazon Affiliate links which means if you purchase something from my link, I may get a few bucks!) For years I have been playing a game called Kaboom! If you haven't heard of it, it is simply a game that requires popsicle sticks and a container. Target words are written on the popsicle sticks. Students take turns choosing a stick out of the container (I use a recycled 32oz yogurt container.) If they say their word correctly, they keep the stick. If they don't they put it back. (Now here comes the fun part!) If they pick a stick that says KABOOM on it, they have to yell KABOOM and put all their sticks back. So simple, right? But I swear the kids LOVE this game and you can elicit SO many good speech sounds in a short amount of time... data win!! I did not come up with this game, another fabulously creative teacher did, but I have seen this game used for letters, sight words, addition facts... anything! The best part about this game is that it can be used for SO many goals. The bad part about this game was that I was purchasing way too many sticks and running out of room to store them. You can check out my blog post about this game from 2013 here. This was when I first started using the game and my baggie method of organizing the popsicle sticks were working. Throw in some mixed articulation groups and 7 different Kaboom game versions and that method quickly failed me. So flash forward to 3 years later and I finally came up with a way to organize my sticks. In fact, the new and improved game I now call, KAPOW! Only requires 25-30 sticks. I created target pictures/cards that I organize in a binder and attach to the sticks with velcro. (I bought a giant roll of velcro dots on Amazon for under $15)The game can be changed in a snap depending on what goal you are addressing. I am so excited to have this new and improved version of the game and I am very excited to share it with you! You can download KAPOW from my TpT store by clicking, here!
Remediation of a lateral /s/ takes patience and a step-by-step approach. I have had success using the ideas of Pamela Marshalla. This product provides the picture support to work with young children on this often very stubborn articulation error. Check it out on Teachers Pay Teachers. t
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Basic vocabulary, like knowing prepositions, is necessary for beginning readers. Teach prepositions with this simple game.
Blank comics are engaging for both younger and older students and allows for targeting many skills. Access a board of free blank comics!
Speech therapy for older children with articulation disorders can be challenging. Here are some tips for assessment, treatment, and carryover.
Smash mats have been so motivating for my students. I use them to target all kinds of speech and language goals. The kids get excited and I get to elicit lots of practice… it's a win, win! I recently have been working with a little girl on expanding her utterance length and was having trouble motivating her. So seeing how excited she got about using smash mats to target other goals, I created these for her! Here is how we use them… I printed and laminated the sentence strips. I have strips for 2, 3, 4, and 5 word utterances. Depending on what we are working on, I will write a target phrase in the empty circles that I want her to imitate. As she says each word, she is able to smash the ball of playdoh that is under the word. A few weeks ago, we were reading There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Rose to get ready for Valentine's Day. As we read the story, we would periodically pause the story and create a phrase about what was happening ("she swallowed some glitter!") We got lots of phrase practice in this way. These strips are also ideal to send home with the kids for practice with their families. If they don't happen to have playdoh, they can put a sticker on the smash mat or eat a small treat after they say each word… whatever motivates them! You can download these mats for free in my TpT store, here!
Cups are a fun tool to incorporate into your speech and language therapy. They are inexpensive, I buy mine at the dollar store, and easy to store. They come in a variety of sizes and colours. If
If your child struggles with articulation, fluency, voice regulation, understanding and expressing himself through language, or nonverbal autism, these speech therapy activities are a great place to start!
Do all kids with sensory processing disorder also have autism? Is SPD on the autism spectrum? Find out the differences and similarities between...
Are you a speech-language pathologist looking for speech therapy activities for preschoolers? This article contains tons of effective activities and speech therapy ideas that will motivate young children to work on a variety of goals. It includes tips for engaging preschoolers during speech therapy sessions, as well as ideas for movement, sensory play, and recommended
5 tips for ending the school year successfully in speech therapy. Get a free to-do list, ideas for the last day activities and more!
I remember as a new SLP, feeding therapy scared me. It felt way out of my wheelhouse because I (Allyssa) was much more used to speech and language therapy. However, with some shadowing of other SLPs, a few good trainings and CEUs, and infinite help from Janae (the other half of Red Rose Speechies),
I created this infographic of the International Phonetic Alphabet in English for a blog post written by my lovely wife which was posted on one of my good friends self-learning language blog. You can read that post here: Linguistics for Language Learners: What is the IPA For more on self-taught language learning check out: www.languagebasecamp.com
Do you ever have days where you know exactly what you need to target, but are just looking for a different way to do it? I know I have had many days like that, especially when working on articulation. My first year in the schools, I know that I was so frustrated with the monotony (to me at the time) of working on articulation, that I wasn't sure I even wanted to do the job anymore! With my crazy caseload now, I have gotten over the feeling that articulation work is monotonous, and now embrace the time I have with my students working on articulation. We can have so much fun together! So, you may ask, how did I get over the feeling of monotony? Well, I made a deal with myself that I would try to change things up. I would take items that I already had and use them as reinforcing activities during articulation work. Here are ten activities that really work for me: 1. Go Fishin- This is a game that I had in my speech room, and every time I had it out for my preschool population, my older students would see it and want to play too. So, I changed it into a way to use it for articulation work. I wrote numbers on the bottom of each fish, so that each time my students catch a fish, they have to say their word or sentence that many number of times. If I could do this again, I would start with higher numbers (I did 1-4) to get more productions. 2. Making Progressive Sentences- My kids think this is hysterical. We start with one articulation card and make a sentence. "I see a soccer player." Then, we add a card and add to our sentence. "I see a soccer player eating a sandwich." Then, we add even more! "I see a soccer player eating a sandwich with Santa." 3. Chipper Chat- This is my one go to item that is fun for all ages. My students LOVE to pick up the chips with the magnetic wand. Students roll the dice and say their word or sentence the number of times on the dice. Then, they get chips to put on their board. When they fill up the board, they can take the chips off. Sometimes, I have students start with all of the chips on the board and take that number of chips off the board. I use the set from Super Duper Inc., but there are lots of different magnet chip boards that you can find on Teachers Pay Teachers. If you don't buy the Chipper Chat set, you can find a bingo magnet and chips at a store like Wal-Mart or Target. I have even seen them at the dollar store occasionally. 4. Paper Clips on Articulation Cards- This works great with the chipper chat magnet wands. Just put paper clips on your articulation cards, and the kids can go fishing for cards. I like to put the cards face down so that the cards are a "surprise" each time. 5. Memory- Ok, I'm sorry, but really, my kids of all ages still LOVE to play memory! I try not to play it too often so it doesn't wear out it's welcome though. 6. Paper Bag- Put cards in a paper bag and pull them out. Try to guess what you will get before you pull it out. If you guess correctly, you get to keep it. First person to guess all of their cards correctly wins. Some kids have a really eerie ability to do this! 7. A Good Book- I love to take a good book out for students and try to find words that start with their sound. I pull out a piece of paper and we write down all of the words that have their sound. I love when I can have them bring books from class for this so that they may think about those words again during reading groups with their teacher. 8. Categories! I have students pick a word from their articulation cards and tell me the category of the item. We create piles of different categories and see how many different piles we can make. Students have to say their word in a sentence, "A sandwich is an food." I love this activity because students get both articulation and language benefits. 9. Guess the Item- I describe the articulation word to the student and see if they can guess the word I am describing. 10. Articulation Recall- We roll the dice to see how many cards the student has to recall. I then present that number of words to the student and give them a moment to memorize them. Then, we flip them over face down and see if the student can recall each word before flipping it back. There you have it! Whether you are just starting out or a seasoned veteran, hopefully some of these ideas will help you to cut the monotony and put more fun in your articulation sessions.
The ultimate goal in helping gestalt language processors using an NLA framework, is naturally encouraging flexible & self generated language.
Take your sound wall to the next level with these CVC flip books that contain word families (or phonograms) that will help students understand the motor movement associated with each sound in the word and learn how to blend. These are great for students who struggle learning to read and for student...
Prompt versus cue - Have you ever wondered the difference? Prompting and cueing are critical components of teaching new skills.
Great Ideas for Teaching is at it again! They have three new materials that I'll be sharing my review of over the next few days. First up, is Language Stimulation Activities! This material can be used to "provide structured, repetitious activities that will assist students in fully learning very important language terms...". It is intended for children in preK through 2nd grade. Each concept pair includes two student worksheets and two instructor worksheets. The student sheet includes four pictures - two to demonstrate each concept. The pages below show the concepts of hot and cold. The instructor's sheet for the first worksheet includes questions and directions such as: - "Is ice cream hot or cold?" - "Point to a picture that shows cold weather." - "Are frozen things hot or cold?" - "If the hot sun shines on a snowman, what will happen to it?" - "When it snows, is the weather hot or cold?" - "Is the word chilly more like hot or cold?" - "On a cold day, does a coat keep you warm or cold?" In all, there are 20 questions on this first instructor worksheet that can be used and/or tailored to the individual needs of students. The second student worksheet includes six concept pairs. According to the instructor's worksheet, students must circle, underline, or mark the picture in another way to appropriately follow the directions that are given. Additional questions are asked as well, such as "Circle the one that has flames. Is it hot or cold?" What I love about this material: - It targets lots of different concepts - hot/cold, happy/sad, wet/dry, new/old, open/closed, inside/outside, front/back, high/low, top/bottom, through/around, big/little, long/short, narrow/wide, fast/slow, push/pull - to name just a few! - It provides tons of practice with the same concept. Often, I feel as though students with language impairments don't receive enough exposure to targeted goals. In this case, students can repeatedly work on the same concept area. - The pictures represent the concept they are portraying very well, so as not to confuse young children. You can find this awesome material to target concept acquisition in a variety of ways for $29.50 HERE! Disclaimer: This item was given to me for review. No other compensation was provided. The opinions expressed here are solely my own.
I posted a picture of this volume control chart on Instagram today (even though it is a little blurry! I need to work on taking better p...
I was flipping through a recent edition of Mailbox Magazine and saw this adorable frog template. The magazine featured a different activity for the frog, but I thought it would make a great articulation craftivity! Here's what you need: Frog Template (HERE is a cute one from DLTK kids.com if you don't get Mailbox) Small articulation (or vocabulary) pictures Red construction paper, cut into strips Scissors Crayons Glue Paper clips (optional) To create the small articulation pictures, I used Lesson Pix. If you haven't used Lesson Pix yet, head on over and try it out (you can give it a test run before subscribing, but it's well worth the $36.00/year subscription fee!) Lesson Pix has a sound finder feature, which I used to get target words for my articulation groups. I created picture cards with the 35 pictures/page option: I colored the frog and lilypad and cut the frog's mouth out. Then I attached the strip of paper to the backside of the frog and glued the pictures on his tongue. You can roll up the frog's tongue and hold it together with a paper clip. This will give it a curly shape even after you remove the paper clip. Kids can practice their words as they unroll the frog's tongue. Other Ways to Use This Craft: Open Ended - You could get some bug stickers and have kids stick the stickers on the frog's tongue for each X number of desired responses (language or artic). Patterning - Use the frog's tongue as a pattern strip (e.g., fly, beetle, fly, beetle) Concepts - Start with a bug in the center of the frog's tongue. Have students glue more bugs "above" or "below" the first. Sequencing - Find small pictures (or use your photocopier to reduce) of steps of a sequence. Have students cut out and glue to the frog's tongue in the correct order. I found some frog life cycle sequencing pictures on Enchanted Learning and Making Learning Fun. What else would you have kids glue to the frog's tongue? I'd love to hear your ideas!
