Older speech students have been in therapy for years…we need to prepare them for life without it. How can we do so in a fun and motivating way?
It can be so difficult to keep our older articulation students motivated. They have heard it all before, it is not new, they want to graduate from speech, but when they leave our rooms, they don't seem to remember the strategies we taught them. Their teachers and parents don't see the progress we claim to see when we drill. Once we get them mastering sounds in isolation, word, and sentence level, we need to work on conversation at a functional level. We need to mimic what they would need to be doing and feeling and experiencing outside of our speech rooms in order for it to be effective and relevant. I am going to share with you my favorite ways to work on carryover that don't require much prep and are tons of fun (hey…my blog's name is Speech Time Fun!). (Disclaimer: This post contains Amazon Affiliate links)
Role Playing:
Act out the various social situations they might experience. Phone conversations, ordering food from a restaurant, ordering food in the cafeteria, conversation at recess or gym, debates, and even practice classroom conversations. What kind of social interactions would they have in a classroom? Presentations, asking and answering questions, group projects, and responding to text-based questions in a guided reading group situation. That is why you can even bring in academically relevant texts to practice reading out loud and answering questions. You can easily find texts at NewsELA and Readworks.org Want others? You can use my Articulation Stories pack!
You can use props and have students role play that they are going to a restaurant. No prep required since they can make their own menus that incorporate their target sounds! Just grab a file folder and done! This is great if it is a mixed group too because you can incorporate vocabulary too.
Above, you can see we had fun making a silly menu, why be serious in speech?!
Humor and Jokes:
One way to elicit excitement and confidence it to incorporate jokes. You can easily grab any children's joke book or even find fun ones online like HERE at Enchanted Learning. Students can make their own joke books that have their sounds. They can practice telling them and explaining why they are funny. They can leave your speech room with confidence to tell their friends joke and be a jokester! We used a file folder again to make it look like a book.
Storytelling:
“What did you do this weekend?” Our students struggle to be able to relay that information using their sounds especially when they are excited to tell us! Practice personal narratives and storytelling. You can use Rory's Story Cubes and my Summarizing Graphic Organizer Freebie and have fun telling silly stories using their target sounds.
You can also use my Roll and Tell an Articulation Story to make silly stories!
Want to learn about more of my ideas? Check out my video below!
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