Grab a free speech therapy schedule template and learn some tips for how to make your speech schedule with less stress this school year!
I fell in love working in speech therapy for middle school! Don't let this awesome group intimidate you, but read about the pros and cons!
These are my must-have speech therapy materials "schools edition!" I'll share my professional philosophy so you can understand my suggestions.
Using a Google Form for speech referrals can cut down on paper piles. Google Forms for speech referrals will also help you share information with teachers!
Who wishes they could be on the hit show GLEE? Well, now is your chance. Here are 10 more songs an SLP should sing at work!
Do you need a quick hook to grab the attention of your students? Are you introducing a new theme, topic, or skill? Mystery Bags are a fun way to elicit student engagement. Mystery Bags are a common use in elementary classrooms as a form of show-and-tell. This activity is so versatile and can be used to address many different goals. So whether your students are in elementary or middle school, this activity will address their goals. In this post, I want to share with you some new ways to use Mystery Bags in your speech therapy lessons. Although I am not a classroom teacher, I like to use a strong teaching strategy with my students called a hook. A hook is an attention grabber. Great teachers grasp their students' attention immediately with a hook. This could be a question, illustration, animation, or object. As a speech-language pathologist I use a hook to help my students focus. Mystery Bags are a great way to introduce a topic or a theme. It gives you the opportunity to connect to background knowledge and access their schema. Items such as a toy bus in August, an apple in September, a small pumpkin in October or November and an an ornament in December are a few options for introducing monthly themes. If your early elementary classes use "letter of the week," put items in the bag that start with target letters (A-apple, B-ball, C-toy car, D-stuffed dog, E-plastic Easter egg). Give student semantic or phonemic clues and have them guess the object inside. Examples of semantic cues would include: "It's a round red fruit, grows on a tree and has seeds. You can use it to make a pie." If giving phonemic cues you might say it starts with /a/ and ends with /l/, or have students blend phonemes /a-p-l/ to figure out the mystery item. Mystery Bags are an interactive social activity. You can target skills such as asking and answering questions, turn-taking, sustained attention, eye contact and perspective and inference skills. By having students ask and answer wh-questions, and give clues for object function and location, you are creating opportunities for rich language discussions. How one student might use an object, such as a stapler, could be different from how another student might use the same object. You can have students take turns holding the bag while others in the group ask questions, or you could hold the mystery bag while students ask you the questions. I have used Mystery Bags with students as young as 3 years old and as old as middle school. If your students need verbal or visual support for asking and answering questions, you can use sentence stems, question sticks, and picture clues to facilitate questioning. In order to get started, I've included a visual map for describing objects using attributes such as: color, shape, size, texture, relative weight, etc. You can also add visuals for questioning such as index cards or sticky notes with the question words "who?" "what?" "when?" "where?" and "how?" Students can ask questions such as, "Who uses this item? Where can you find it? What color is it? What is it used for?" and "How does it work?" In this post, I have touched on a few different ways to use Mystery Bags in your speech therapy sessions. This activity is also perfect for mixed groups because you can target articulation, phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, expressive language, receptive language, vocabulary, syntax, and pragmatic language all in the same lesson. If you use Mystery Bags in your speech therapy, I'd love to hear from you. Comment below and share your amazing ideas! Link to the free visual map shown above HERE and download. Share this post with someone that you think could benefit from these ideas and freebie. Don't forget to sign up for my newsletter below and follow my blog on Bloglovin' or enter your email in the sidebar to receive my blog directly to your inbox. Don't miss a single post. Lisa, SLP Subscribe to our mailing list and receive my TIER 2 Vocabulary FREEBIE * indicates required Email Address * First Name *
Speech therapy for older children with articulation disorders can be challenging. Here are some tips for assessment, treatment, and carryover.
My best tips for teaching story grammar elements, plus my packet of visual supports and 13 no-prep short stories for story grammar practice.
A free printable set of 10 speech inference cards for kids
I have found some great teletherapy resources in the last few months but I am still missing all the games from my speech room. Now that I have figured out how to use my Osmo as a document camera I thought this would open up the possibilities of using some of my games during teletherapy! I went through my games and came up with six games/activities that I can play while screen sharing. I have tweaked some of the instructions just a little to make it work and some I changed up the rules to help be more specific in targeting goals. Here's a collection of six games to screen share during teletherapy! Rory's Story Cubes These little cubes are great for so many language and articulation goals! You can target naming/identifying pictures, using verbs, self-monitoring articulation skills, producing grammatically correct sentences, generating a narrative, and telling a story using sequencing skills just to name a few. While I was sharing about these cubes Hanna from My Literacy Space commented letting me know there is an awesome app too! I think the app is probably a better option to share during therapy as the dice are bigger. When I share the app I don't need to use the Osmo, but I just didn't take it apart. I followed the same steps as I would if I were screen sharing the Osmo (just opened the app I wanted instead of the Osmo document camera app). Kids on Stage This game can target understanding categories (animals, objects, and actions), following directions, and making inferences. First, spin the spinner, and then choose a matching card to act out. The other players in the game aren't supposed to see the card so I usually just have them turn around, or cover/close their eyes. First player to guess correctly gets a point and first player to 5 points wins! HedBanz Junior This one is played a little differently over teletherapy. We don't wear the headbands instead, we take turns flipping over a card and the other players in the group have to ask questions to figure out what the card may be. I like the junior version for my younger kids because all the cards are animals. With this game, we can target naming animals, following directions, taking turns, asking/answering questions, using articulation skills in conversation, and making inferences. Pickles to Penguins This fun card game is the best for practicing comparing and/or contrasting which is what it's all about! You flip over two cards and someone has to tell what the two objects have in common. I usually challenge my kids to see who can find the most similar characteristics (or differences depending on what we're targeting) between the two objects. Pictionary My drawing skills are not the best but this game is always a fun one! Pictionary is so easy to change depending on what you are targeting. I rarely use the cards that come with the actual game. Instead, if we're working on articulation skills I flash cards that contain the targeted sound (you also need to tell the other players to turn around during this part too). If we're working on verbs I use pictures of verbs and so on. We keep score by who can shout out the name of the picture fastest. When playing with kids over the computer we just use a marker and notebook paper but I do like that the game now comes with a dry erase board and marker! Spot It Spot It is one of my favorite games to play when we have a few minutes left in a session. Over teletherapy, I put down one card face up and then a pile of cards face down. I flip one card from the pile over at a time. I usually only change one of the cards each round. The person who can shout out the match first gets a point. First player to 5 points wins! I hope that gave you some ideas of how to can use games you already have during teletherapy. If you are unable to use the Osmo as a document camera or don't have a document camera/Osmo you could easily adapt most of these games by just showing the cards using the built-in web camera. Just be sure to tell any other players in the group not to peek when flashing the cards or dice.
Working PRN at the SNF on weekends, it can get a little lonely. I much prefer the weekdays of Christmas break and Summer break that I get to work with the entire team! Since I have known them all so long…and they know my ways…I like to leave little silly notes for them like the ... Read More about Play Ball Like an SLP
Need a new way to keep track of your speechy therapy data? Check out this post with tips to set up your own data system on Google Forms!
Check out this ultimate list of over 200 free speech therapy materials for all of your needs! Save your money for what really matters!
Use busy picture scenes in speech therapy! Download a free language scene and use a free Pinterest board with over 100 scenes.
If you need fun icebreaker games for elementary students, keep reading! In this post, you’ll get links to all the free icebreakers in ...
Working with speech therapy mixed groups can be a challenge for novice and veteran SLPs. If you’re a school-based SLP, my guess is most or all of your groups are comprised of students with a variety of goals, individually and/or as a collective. Depending on the complexity of the needs in your group, you may feel like
Not quite sure how to use play-based speech therapy activities with your speech therapy caseload? All your questions are answered here!
SLPs, have you just been assigned to a middle school placement for the first time? Or perhaps you have been in a middle school setting, but need new speech-language therapy ideas?This giant 545 page bundle is exactly what you need! The eleven items included in this bundle will allow you to target ...
Listen to the Real Talk SLP episode to learn how to be productive with your speech therapy schedule so you can get your to-do's done!
Great ideas from an librarian, SLP, and PK teacher!
BOOM CARDSMy students love how engaging Boom Cards can be! Using the Zoom platform, I can share my screen, pull up a Boom Card resource and hand over
Are you studying for the SLP praxis exam? Check out some of my best tips for acing this important test! Keep up the hard work!
Are you looking for ways to tackle life skills with your students? Do you want to incorporate information from the community? Try receipts
Correcting Lisps and Vocalic R Can Be Stressful ...But it doesn't need to be. If you're tearing your hair out, wondering how to correct a lisp or how to correct vocalic r, please don't stress anymore! Chances are, if you're a speech language pathologist, you're going to encounter lisps or vocalic /r/ errors. I don't
At the beginning of every school year, I like to take mass baselines for all of my students so that I have a good clean idea on where they are toward meeting the goals set for them on their IEPs. Maybe they had a summer miracle or maybe they’ve regressed a little. Today I’m going […]
At the beginning of every school year, I like to take mass baselines for all of my students so that I have a good clean idea on where they are toward meeting the goals set for them on their IEPs. Maybe they had a summer miracle or maybe they’ve regressed a little. Today I’m going […]
Are you a speech pathologist that works with 4th and 5th graders? Do you need tips on how to work best with your upper elementary students? This is the ultimate SLP Guide for working with 4th and 5th grade in a school setting! In this blog post, I'm going to share some of my favorite
Therapy games are one way to help children who struggle with emotional regulation. Playing CBT contains 15 different therapy games for children.
Speech therapy resources, including printable speech therapy activities, social stories for speech therapy, & more!
If your student is having a hard time focusing on their schoolwork these days why not try games instead! Read through for a list of my favorite OT Teletherapy games that can be played off-screen and on-screen. Shhh! They won’t know they are still learning through play!
Trying to decide how to set up your student data in your speech therapy room? Click for an overview of different data taking systems outlined just for SLPs!
If you are struggling with how to set up your push-in speech therapy sessions, this post will give a framework for how to do it!
The average workday for a school SLP is filled with starts and stops in very different tasks! Setting priorities will help you stay focused!
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
Using "no print" PDFs or interactive PDFs in speech therapy over the computer is a great way to target goals in teletherapy
Conversations can be difficult with kids. In this post, I talk about how using a ball with your kids can help with understanding concept.
Effective strategies and activities for using book companions in speech therapy with preschool and elementary students.
