3 Quick Go-To Activities to Pair with Books During Literacy-Based Speech Therapy Sessions

Books are an incredible resource to use in your speech therapy sessions. But you probably already knew that, didn’t you? 😉

But what happens AFTER you read the story? What kinds of activities do you do to reinforce those speech targets?

Here are 3 speech target areas that have several quick and easy go-to activities you can pair with ANY book.

1. Story retell 
2. High articulation trials 
3. Vocabulary/Language 

Quick & Easy Target Area #1: Story retell 

Story retell activities can range from being relatively simple to more complex. Here are some ideas for a story retell activity:

• Have students practice telling different parts of the story. Flip through the pages in the book to help give them some visual support (especially the first retell practice).
• Act out the story by having students pretend to be the different characters.
• Draw or print and cut out pictures of the characters. Use these pictures to retell the story.

Quick & Easy Target Area #2: High articulation trials 

Getting high articulation trials during a mixed speech therapy group can be tricky. Here are some super easy ideas for getting those trials in!

• As you read the story, have students write down words they hear with their target speech sound. If your students are younger, have them say the word they hear and you write it down. Practice these words 10 times each. See if the student can say it 10 times in a row without a mistake. If this is easy, see if they can say them even faster or put the word in a simple sentence.
• Draw 10 boxes on a piece of paper. Grab several different colored markers. As students practice their word 10 times, have them put a dot in each of the boxes. When they start their next word, grab a new color and repeat the activity. See if you can get 10 colored dots in each box (for a total of 100 words!).
• Grab a piece of graph paper. As students practice their sound in syllables or words, have them put a tally or a dot in each of the boxes. Depending on the age of the student, you may want to cut the graph paper in half or in fourths so it’s not as overwhelming. Student may not fill up the entire page in one session and can continue during the next session.

Quick & Easy Target Area #3: Vocabulary and Language

There are several ways to target language skills during speech therapy…It really just depends on what specific target you choose to do. Here are a few ideas for language targets:

• Define any unknown words. Can you find any synonyms or antonyms? Does the word have a familiar prefix or suffix to help you determine the meaning? What about context clues in the text?
• Verb tense can be an easy target while using books in your sessions. Write down some of the verbs from the story. Sort them into their verb tense (e.g., past, present, future). Then see if you can name that particular verb in the other verb tenses (e.g., stopped, stop, will stop).
• Compare and contrast two items or vocabulary words from the story. What makes them the same? What makes them different? Learn about Venn diagrams.

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