Struggling to come up with activities for back to school for your older speech therapy students?

It can be hard to find speech and language activities appropriate for older students. That's why I've come up with this list of five back to school themed speech therapy activities that are appropriate for older kids! Click through to read about each activity.

We spend our summers visiting the Target Dollar Spot, browsing Pinterest, and coming up with cute back to school themed therapy ideas. But we always tend to forget about the older ones. If you only work with older students, you don't forget about them but are always trying to find new ways to work with them so they are motivated. I have gathered my 5 favorite ideas that have a back to school theme that are appropriate for older students. You can use these ideas to target a variety of goals which is always the bonus. Did I also mention that all of these ideas take minutes to prep!?

Design Your Dream School

Students can work together (social skills) and design their own dream school. You can help them by assigning roles like writer, illustrator, and presenter if they struggle to work together. They can come up with WHAT will be there, WHERE would it be, WHO would work there, HOW will it look, WHEN will they go to each class, and even WHY did they make each decision! They can draw it out and write about it to work on written expression. They can defend their answers. They can come up with their own and share with their peers. They can ask each other questions about why they did what they did. The sky is the limit!

Taboo School Style

Have you ever heard of the game Taboo? It can be really challenging for our students since it requires so much language! You can easily make your own version with paper or index cards. Take school related words and mark down the common descriptions that they should NOT say!

School Themed Reading Comprehension Passages

You can easily find school themed reading passages to work on any goal! You can find relevant news articles on NewsELA.com. Many of my packs on TpT have school themed topics too! Click HERE to grab my Inferencing Comics and HERE to grab my Text Evidence Print and Go Pack (seen below) which both have school themed passages and can be used to work on higher level thinking.

School Objects Tier 1 Context Clues Practice

Want to introduce working on context clues or just practice it further? Just take any sentence describing school objects and omit the object. Can they use the clues to guess what it is? Can they express what clues helped them? Can they make their own clues to trick their peers?! Read more about my strategies for working on context clues by clicking HERE!

Inferring using Google Images

You can easily find school related images on Google Images. Can your students use their perspective taking skills? Can they guess what is happening? Where are they? What are they doing? How are they feeling? Can they make smart guesses about the pictures? My all time favorite images to use are Norman Rockwell art. Click HERE to learn more about it!