Speech therapy group activities that meet all your students’ needs and make planning easier for you. I’ve included speech therapy group ideas for preschoolers, middle school speech therapy group activities, and my favorite articulation activities.
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Speech Therapy Group Activities
Planning for group therapy can be a hard task on its own, but when you’re trying to plan for a mixed group, with multiple goals, levels, and strengths, it can quickly become a very daunting task. Scheduling, planning for, and putting together activities for mixed groups is difficult and can take a lot of time, but I am here to help.
Now I wish I could tell you that I had the solution to every single one of these problems and I never stressed about them again. But the truth is, I don’t. There is never one way to make every single teacher and therapist happy with the schedule or to always have the perfect therapy group; however, I do have some tricks that I’ve learned along the way that make it so much easier and less stressful.
To learn more about me and my journey as a school SLP click here.
How to Schedule Groups
I should preface this with a little information about my school setting because I know they are all a little different. I work full-time in a pretty large elementary school with at least one other full-time SLP. Not only do we share the caseload, we also share a therapy space. While I know this may not be ideal for everyone, we have used it to our advantage. Because our school is so large, we have never been able to split caseloads by grade level (due to school master schedules and large numbers of students in each grade) so we’ve always had some students in every grade, K-5. Once we started sharing a room, we also started scheduling together so that we can accommodate more students from the same class(es) at the same time. This prevents teachers from having multiple speech times for their classroom and helps us group students together more effectively.
Here is an example:
Mrs. A and Mrs. B, both third grade ESE inclusion teachers with similar daily schedules and a heavy caseload of speech and/or language students in each of their classes.
This is one way we may schedule their students:
With this schedule, both Mrs. A and B have only one speech time (9:30) that ALL of their students have speech. Half come Mon/Tues and the other half come Thurs/Fri. So much easier for the teachers and students to remember with fewer distractions and interruptions. And we get to group students based on goals with 2 different language-only groups and 2 different speech-only groups. It makes therapy planning SO much more manageable.
Activities for Mixed Groups
These are a few of my favorite therapy activities for my mixed groups:
- Picture Scenes
- Games
- Retell
- Board Games
- Online Activities
Story-Telling and Retell Activities – These can be as simple as using story dice or sequencing pictures to have students make-up their own story.
Story Champs is probably one of my all-time favorites and I use it every week in my therapy sessions. It is structured to be used as a language intervention (perfect for MTSS), but as a therapist, you can adapt to use easily within your therapy sessions. The Story Champs program comes with a ton of stories, on various levels, to be paired with their pre-made lesson plans. These plans are organized by individual, small group, or large group sessions.
You can start at any level within the program based on your students’ ability levels and needs. I use their free assessment (the CUBED) as a pre/post-test or progress monitoring to see what my students’ need to work on. There are also add-on lessons to help address vocabulary and complex sentence structure, they’ve really thought of everything. I highly recommend checking it out! They also include a Spanish version if you are in need of bilingual materials. I have attended a few of their trainings as well and I highly recommend them.
Picture Scenes – perfect to adapt for any articulation or language goal.
- Pick out words to address at the word, phrase, or sentence level for articulation drill
- Work on carryover of articulation skills in describing and story-telling tasks
- Have students make up a story about the picture to address story-retell and grammar goals
- Ask questions about the picture to address wh question and vocabulary goals
- Have students describe the scene to work on vocabulary and grammar goals
Describing
Print and laminate the color picture scenes or objects to reuse over and over or display pictures on a tablet/laptop and ask the student to describe what is in the picture or what the object is used for. I also print the black-and-white scenes and copy them for each student so they can color them during the session and then take it home for extra practice. This is a great way to address carryover, especially for our younger students.
Board Games
Headbanz is a great game to use for carryover because the students will have to either ask questions or describe items which both provide great opportunities to incorporate target sounds in natural conversation. I also enjoy using linking games (such as Pickles to Penguins) for carryover activities. In these games, students will have to express how 2 or more items are related (or how they go-together) in complete sentences.
Online Activities
I have recently joined and started using UltimateSLP with both my private clients and school students and I am really enjoying it. There are tons of games that focus on different language and articulation skills that you pull up right on your tablet or laptop. They’re great for in-person or teletherapy sessions.
I also use apps for story dice, silly sentences, and matching games on my tablet for fun, virtual games with my kiddos.
Speech Therapy Group Activities for Different Ages
Sometimes in our field, we have to plan for so many different age levels, even in a single setting. So here are some of my favorite activities for preschool through middle school.
Speech Therapy Group Activities for Preschoolers
We all know that preschoolers do not have the longest attention spans and it can be difficult to keep them on task for a significant period of time. So typical drill, at the therapy table therapy, is probably not going to be the way to go. So instead, we play! Play therapy will get you the most bang for your buck, especially with these littles.
Here is an example of using play therapy, following the child’s lead (in this case my son, age 3), and using their interests to lead therapy planning.
Click here to see the example video.
Some more of my favorite activities for littles are listed below:
- Blocks
- Cars
- Puzzles
- Short Books
- Crafts
Speech Therapy Activities for 7-year-olds and Elementary Students
My kids love to color so I developed these color-by-code language sheets that can be used in mixed groups or any therapy session to target a variety of goals. They come in many different themes and I am creating new ones all the time. Check out my language AND articulation color-by-code sheets over in my store.
Middle School Speech Therapy Group Activities
For middle schoolers, I would plan a variety of board games (Pickles to Penguins, Apples to Apples, Would You Rather? – junior, appropriate versions of course), card games, short videos to describe and retell, and articles about preferred interests.
Group Activities for Articulation
Even when you’re lucky enough to have a group of articulation goals only, planning for the variety of target sounds and levels can still be challenging. I have tons of articulation activities over in my store to help you out including worksheets, foldables, color-by-codes, and crafts.
Speech Therapy /r/ Activities
This r, l, and l, r blend worksheet packet has everything you need to work on L and R in all positions of words, l and r blends in words, and target sounds in sentences and answering questions.
These articulation activities for r, l, and related blends are the perfect addition to your therapy room to use in sessions and/or to send home for additional practice. They can be used as preschool articulation activities and are the perfect articulation activities for older students as well. No prep articulation activities can be hard to find, but these printable articulation activities are so much fun for the kiddos, they love them!
Speech Therapy /s, z/ Activities
/s/ worksheets, /s/ blends worksheets
Looking for some new speech articulation activities for your speech therapy sessions? These are excellent articulation activities for preschoolers and school-age students.
The no prep articulation activities include worksheets, reinforcers, and sentence level articulation activities for carryover.
Speech therapy printables, perfect for preschool speech therapy and school-age speech therapy.
Ready to print foldables for the following sounds:
- Initial and final /s/
- Initial and final /z/
- Initial /s/ blends: /st, sn, sm, sp, sk, sl/
- Final /s/blends: /ts, ps, ks/
Each foldable includes a cover (with visual placement for mouth), syllable practice page, 6 pictures for word, phrase, and/or sentence practice, draw & describe page for carryover in connected speech, word lists for each sound
More Speech Therapy Group Activities and Ideas:
10 Speech Therapy Games for Mixed Groups from The Dabbling Speechie
Large Group Language Activities from The Speech Bubble SLP
Speech Therapy Group Ideas For SNFs from The Traveling Traveler
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I hope you found the information about speech therapy group activities helpful. Please leave a comment or shoot me an email if you want to share some of your favorite speech therapy group activities.
