Ahoy Mateys! ⚓️ September 19th is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. As an SLP and R sound enthusiast, we celebrate big in my speech room. In fact, I used to make the entire month of September pirate themed! Here is a list of fun activities you can use in your speech room this month or any month. Because let's face it, anytime is a good time for SLPs to work on saying ARRR! 1. Say ARRR: Talk Like a Pirate workbook for eliciting vocalic AR. Arrr you ready to tackle the R sound? This workbook is designed specifically to help you elicit vocalic R (the AR context) with a fun pirate theme ..read more

Ahoy Mateys! ⚓️ September 19th is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. As an SLP and R sound enthusiast, we celebrate big in my speech room. In fact, I used to make the entire month of September pirate themed! Here is a list of fun activities you can use in your speech room this month or any month. Because let's face it, anytime is a good time for SLPs to work on saying ARRR! 1. Say ARRR: Talk Like a Pirate workbook for eliciting vocalic AR. Arrr you ready to tackle the R sound? This workbook is designed specifically to help you elicit vocalic R (the AR context) with ..read more

☠ ☠ ☠ Want to keep your speech students engaged and entertained this fall? Switch your regular mouth model for a SKULL. I came up with this idea after working on tongue placement over and over and over with my students. They needed repeated practice, but were getting bored with the same old props. Enter the skull and wow - game changer! A skull is the perfect September-October mouth model because Talk Like a Pirate Day is September 19th and of course followed by Halloween. Skulls fit perfectly into those themed lessons. Ideas for incorporating skulls into speech therapy ..read more

You have a new student on your caseload, and they aren’t yet stimulable for their target sound (meaning they aren’t able to imitate it with models yet). Parents may be eager to participate, but this is not the time to send home “speech homework” in the form of word lists or drill-based activities. Let me explain. Let’s say it’s the R sound you’re working on. You could easily print out an R sound word list to send home, but practicing a distorted R over and over isn’t going to improve production. They’d be practicing the wrong tongue placement and the wrong sound. That isn’t going to be helpfu ..read more

'Tis the Season ? for holiday and winter activities!   The holiday season is here and SLPs everywhere are just trying to make it to Christmas break. Let me save you a little planning time with these festive downloadable activities.   FREE Magic Snowflake Activity. All you need is a white crayon and watercolor paints or washable markers. Use the white crayon to draw snowflakes on your paper. Then, paint over them and watch as snowflakes magically appear! There is also a sheet for creating magic speech words included in this download. FREE Winter Clues Activity. Read clues ..read more

October is here and I’ve got a list of festive activities for your speech therapy sessions!   FREE Spooky Clues Early Inferencing Activity. This is a fun one! Give each student a coloring sheet and crayons. You read the clues aloud and students have to infer which item is being described. They color in the item and wait for you to read the next clue. This activity is extra great because you can play this free video that goes along with it. Then you don’t even have to read the clues - the video does it all for you!  FREE Halloween Roll and Race. Grab dice and a marker and you ..read more

Here’s a tip for making your speech therapy sessions extra fun: use a magnifying glass!  You can hold it up to your mouth as you model the speech sounds for your students. Then, have them hold it up to their own mouth in the mirror to see their articulators move into place. It super-sizes their view of your mouth, and this light-up version gives them an extra clear view. It’s also just hilarious to watch each other talk with giant magnified mouths. Go ahead, try it! I dare you not to laugh.  You can also use magnifying glasses to find speech words on worksheets, in s ..read more

If you haven’t tried speech motor chaining with your R students, I highly recommend you keep reading!  Chaining is a treatment approach during which you build on pre-trained sounds, gradually increasing the complexity of speech movements. For example, your students would say:  ray → raise → raisin → raisin cookies→ Mom is baking raisin cookies. The targets in this example are “chained”, building on the base utterance, “ray”. The complexity of the speech movements and length of utterance increases as you move through the chain.  Speech motor chaining takes the principles of moto ..read more

Over the course of my career in the public schools, I have used many different visuals and techniques to teach speech sounds.  The one I’m sharing today is designed to help students who substitute /sh/ for /ch/. For example, they say ship instead of chip. The CH sound is an affricate, so you might hear SLPs calling this error pattern deaffrication.  Let’s take a closer look at what is happening during this sound substitution. Basically, the student is removing the “stop feature” of the CH sound and turning into an SH. The lateral margins of the tongue are lifted, which is great, but ..read more

Play Dough Tongues for Teaching the R Sound The R sound can be challenging to correct, but visuals help! And play dough tongues are some of the best visuals I’ve used.  What makes play dough tongues helpful? One of the reasons the R sound is tricky is because it is hard to see what your tongue is doing in your mouth when you produce it. If a child can see the tongue shape and feel it with their hands, it can help them understand what I’m telling them to do with their own tongue. How do I use play dough tongues to teach my students the R sound? First, you will want to teach them ..read more