Getting students motivated to work on articulation, especially with older students, is a challenge. Then you add on getting them to do it virtually, without any manipulatives, and paperless …. That’s a whole other ball game.
I find that we all need more articulation activities and resources because you don’t want to just keep drilling flashcards over and over again. You’re going to get tired of it and your students are going to get tired of it. We want to keep our students engaged and have them show up to speech excited and not knowing what to expect. So today I want to share with you some of my favorite virtual tools to help you work on articulation. These will help you with trials, switching it up, and keeping things fresh so you and your students don’t feel like you’re doing the same thing over and over again!!
Online – Stopwatch
This website has a lot of fun and interactive stopwatches but if you scroll to the bottom there are name pickers. This is designed for teachers to help them pick names so that they aren’t calling on the same students every time. However, we can modify this and put in articulation sounds for any target and it makes it fun for your students because they don’t know what you’re going to pick. You can also remove sounds once a student has mastered it. This could be paired with a theme, another activity, or you could even use it at the beginning and the end of a data tracking period to get some baseline data for your progress monitoring.
There are also lots of different options for the look of this tool so you don’t have to do a magic hat each time.
Toy Theater
I absolutely love this site and it’s free teacher tools! There are so many great tools but one of the tools I use often is the virtual dice roller. One thing I will have students do with this is to roll the dice and then whatever number they get, that is how many times they have to say their sound. It keeps the students on their toes and gets them practicing their sounds.
Another thing you can do if you go back to teacher tools is to select a tool like the hundreds chart. Clearly, this is designed for math but if you’ve ever done an activity in-person like a race to 100 where you try to get 100 trials in one session with things like boxes or erasers or cheerios ….this is a way to do it virtually. I will ask my students what their favorite color is and then I’ll tell them each time you get a good “er” sound I’m going to color in the square pink. This is an activity where you can do a split screen with things like the dice where the student has to roll it multiple times to get to 100. Another idea is to pair it with the name picker. Just a simple way to get a lot of trials in during a 30 min session.
Another tool I love on this site is the virtual manipulatives. I’ve used this bear counter and told the students every time you say the sound, I’m going to add a bear. Then I like to make it a little bit competitive and say let's see which student can get the most bears on their chart during our session. There are so many possibilities with the virtual manipulatives!
Roll & Tell An Articulation Story
I also wanted to share with you if your not familiar that I do have a roll and tell Google Slides activity for articulation in my tpt store. I love this activity for carryover, working with mixed groups, and working with older students. It could also be paired with some of the virtual tools I mentioned earlier like the virtual dice option. This resource comes with a graphic organizer where the students can create their story and then fill it in. Just one more easy, no-prep, resource to make your life a little easier when it comes to articulation.
We may not have all of our tools that we would normally have like our dry erase board, our manipulatives, and our games, but we do have some other virtual options that we can use with our students to still keep things fresh and interesting. If we are bored, our students sense it. And just the same way, if we are excited about this new tool that we found and you bring it to your speech room, your students are going to be excited too and they will be more willing to work towards those challenging goals.
Want to learn more? Check out the video and the resources I mentioned for engaging, no prep activities to use with your students this week!
Resource shared: http://bit.ly/STF-RollArticulationStory
Don't forget to grab my virtual tools reference guide! speechtimefun.com/virtualtools
