Enjoy these easy, low-prep speech and language activities for the start of the school year!
The first few weeks of a new school year can be, let’s say…hectic. Between reading IEPs, scheduling, coordinating with teachers and other providers, and setting up your room, sometimes the last thing on your mind is providing speech therapy to your students! I’ve got you covered! Check out these mostly low- and no-prep speech therapy activities that will help get your school year off to a great start!
Back to School Search & Say: This is a print-and-go speech therapy activity that will keep your mixed groups busy throughout the entire session! It includes pages for all articulation sounds in all word positions, plus seven pages of language targets. Students practice their speech and language targets, then search the page to find where they’re hidden.
Back to School Articulation Boom Cards: These Boom Learning decks include articulation targets for /r, s, l, k, g, and f/. Each card has a list of words for students to find, and the interactive classroom scenes allow students to move objects around as they search for their target words. There are also visual sentence starters for students working on articulation beyond the word level. These Boom Cards are available individually or as a bundle.
No Prep All About Speech Activity: This one page printable is great for articulation groups! Just print, make copies, and get out the crayons, markers, or colored pencils. At the beginning of the school year, I always like to go over speech goals and expectations with my students, and this activity provides a wonderful opportunity to do just that! Best of all, it’s available for free in my freebie library!
Back to School Memory Game Boom Cards: For a no-prep, digital game that can be used with mixed groups, this free Boom Learning game is amazing! It includes two separate boards with different back-to-school items, and each time you refresh the deck, all the items shuffle (so students can’t memorize where they were before).
Back to School Inference Bingo: I love playing bingo games in speech! This back to school themed bingo game has both color and black/white options, so it can be as high or low prep as you’d like. Print in color and laminate cards for a quick and easy activity you can use year after year, or print in black and white as a low prep option that students can mark up, color, or daub with paint! Inference clues make this bingo game a bit more challenging, as students have to guess the item while you read the hints one by one. This is a great activity for working on vocabulary, inferences, asking/answering questions, and describing. It’s also an open ended game, so you can use it with mixed groups while also working on individual speech and language targets.
Back to School Conversation Starters: Another Boom Card freebie! This conversation starter deck includes both open-ended questions and “would you rather” questions, so students can have fun getting to know each other at the start of the school year. It’s free and it’s digital, so there’s no prep involved!
Back to School Describing by Attribute: Do you have students working on describing using EET or attributes? This Boom Learning deck has cards for describing 15 back to school words, and each card has a fill-in-the-blank format so students can work on their descriptive language skills.
Back to School Describing Real Photos: This is another no-prep activity for working on descriptive language skills. It includes 12 real photos with a back-to-school theme, and sentence starters that will help students describe what they see in the images.
I hope at least one of these activities helps to get your school year off to a smooth start!
Psst! I’ve just added a free version of back to school bingo to my freebie library! It includes six unique printable bingo boards and drawing cards for game play. Don’t have access to my freebie library yet? Sign up below!
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