Speech Card Set Activity: Quick DIY Speech Sort

Here's another quick speech activity that takes only a few minutes to prepare. You'll need some kind of sorting tray (I used a veggies & dip platter.) and small squares of colored paper. If you want to work on a sound in isolation, just write the letter on the squares using a marker. If you want to work on words from cards sets, download a card set (free cards, premium sets), print, and cut out the pictures. Then tape them onto the colored squares of paper. Put your colored stimuli in the center and the kids say the sounds/words as they take them out of the middle and sort them by color into the sections of the tray.

Speech Card Set Activity: Speech for Beads

Preparation
Grab a muffin tin or empty egg carton. Gather enough pipe cleaners or pieces of yarn for everyone in your group and a bunch of craft beads. Download a card set (free cards, premium sets), print, and cut out the pictures. Drop one picture and a few beads in the bottom of each cup in the muffin tin/egg carton.

Activity
In order to choose a bead from the cup, the child must say the speech word at the assigned level (word, x3, phrase, sentence, etc.). The children take turns saying the words and choosing beads to string onto their bracelet/keychain/etc. After you get through all 12 words once or twice, put new pictures in the bottom of the tin. At the end of the therapy session, they get to take their creation with them.

Variations
The muffin tin could be filled with pom-poms that are to be glued onto paper. Alternately, the game could be to add things (pom-poms, beads, counting bears, squinkies) into the tins using tweezers until the pictures are "hidden". Children will enjoy just about any variation on this theme. Cheerios or froot loops are always popular as well with the youngest children.

Simple DIY Speech Warm-up Teacher Will Thank You For

Grab a piece of cardstock, a sharpie, a few jumbo craft sticks, and some tape. In about five minutes you'll have a speech warm-up that classroom teachers will thank you for.

Fold the cardstock to make a sleeve for the craft stick and tape together. For your initial sound warm-ups, position the sleeve to the left and write your initial phoneme on the end of the sleeve that you'll insert the stick into. Then write several word endings on the stick. As the child moves the stick back and forth they'll create several target words to practice and at the same time they're getting some phonics practice in as well.

For the final phonemes, position the sleeve to the right. Feel free to use the back of the same stick you just used for an initial phoneme. Write a word ending that ends with your target sound on the edge of the sleeve closest to the end in which the stick is placed. Then write several initial sounds that work with that ending to make a word. Now the child is practicing several words that end with your target sound and practicing word families at the same time.

It took me less than five minutes to make these. You could easily make a small set of these for each group you work with by taking just a few minutes before your session. Alternately, make them as a group project and send them home for practice. Children would have a lot of fun making these if you gave them several colors of papers and pens to choose from when making them.