Keeping All Students Engaged in Mixed Speech and Language Therapy Groups

Students misbehaving in your mixed speech groups?  Struggling to keep all students engaged and participating?

Keeping everyone busy can be a struggle.  You want to give your full attention to all.   You want to be able to focus and help your articulation students get those target sounds.  Your social skills students are struggling to maintain a conversation.  Your language students are getting frustrated since they are always doing poorly in school.  It can be a real challenge.  When we are limitations in scheduling and we have full caseloads, we have no choice but to have mixed speech groups.

One way I have learned to tackle this issue is to make each student a key or visual to let them know what they are responsible of achieving during the group.  Then, we all play the same game or activity.  You can easily turn any game into a game for mixed speech groups.

Pick a stick – DIY game for mixed speech groups

Give each student a visual/key and assign each prompt a color.  You can use markers, stickers, or shapes.  Match those onto Popsicle sticks.  Put the Popsicle sticks into a cup and let students pick a stick to determine the task they have to do.  You can even throw “zap” sticks to make them lose all their sticks or even “bonus turn” sticks to make things exciting.

DIY Color By Speech Task for Mixed Groups

You can make a visual/key and assign each task a crayon color or even BINGO dabbers.  In order to be able to color with that color, students must do their assigned task first.   Give them any coloring page and have fun!

You can even spice it up by adding numbers to the coloring page and make it a color by number if you wanted!

What are some other DIY games you can do with mixed groups?

You can let students build with Lego pieces that color, build a Mr. Potato head, or even play with that Play Doh color!  So many possibilities.  You can make your own DIY visuals using a piece of paper or index cards.  If you don’t want to make your own, you can check out my Visuals for Mixed Speech Groups on TpT by CLICKING HERE!