A Semester of Articulation Therapy Ideas

As my semester wraps up, I’ve started compiling ideas that I’ve used thus far! One of my clients was a very young artic client. He was incredibly cooperative and wonderful, so I got the chance to try out all sorts of activities and games on him. Here are some ideas that worked really well for us this semester:

1) Wham!      Wham! was the hit of the semester. It is a really easy, basic game. I used the articulation cards from Mommy Speech Therapy and printed off a bunch of these Wham! cards. I laminated all of it and put them mixed together in an old container.

My client and I took turns back and forth picking a card from the container. If he produced it correctly, he could keep it. If not, he put it back to try again! If either of us picked a Wham! card, we put it aside and put away x number of our articulation cards. The one who has the most cards when the container runs out wins! Easy, right?

We finished most sessions by playing Wham! so that we could collect the cards needed for the game throughout the session. For example, I made this caterpillar from Testy Yet Trying. I put velcro on each circle and a velcro piece on each articulation card. During therapy, I fill up the caterpillar and my client needs to say each word correctly to remove it from the caterpillar and add it to the Wham! container.

I also made a simple paper dice from cardstock for the same concept. I put velcro on each square and we needed to get each articulation card off to fill the bucket for Wham!.

2) Searching for things   My clients favorite was doing the Bug Hunt from Let’s Talk Speech Language Pathology. I taped them up around the room and we either looked for them in the dark with a flashlight, or in the light and swatted them with flyswatter! Oftentimes, I used the same articulation flashcards as I used in Wham! so he collected the cards for Wham! off of the bugs as well.

I love hiding themed items with articulation words on them as well. Very unoriginal stuff over here… but, for fall, I hid paper leaves with articulation pictures on them. My client went around the clinic to find them all, and then glued them onto an empty tree.

My last ‘hidden things’ idea was to put articulation cards on top of small cups and hide a few stickers beneath random cups. My client was prompted to say, “Is it under the _____?” before picking up each cup. This is how I began practicing the words in phrases and sentences. We both took turns going back and forth to see who could collect the most stickers!

3) iPad Games    While we didn’t do this much because my client honestly wasn’t that into it… I do still have some favorite articulation apps! My all time favorite is Articulation Scenes by Smarty Apps. I’ll do a full review on it another time, but for now, if you’re in the market for an awesome articulation app, I’d recommend it. I also used Story Creator for making word level and phrase level books. You can read my earlier blog post on this app here. iPad games are also great to check for generalization and carryover.

4) Cariboo   This game is so wonderful. The first time I played it with one of my client’s we played it five times in a row. And he still asked for more! You can read my blog post devoted to this game here. I just recently found another copy and snatched it!

Another thing to always keep in mind, is ORGANIZATION. It’s one of my favorite things… and I’m not kidding! In order to keep all of these fabulous articulation cards organized and ready to be played with, I came up with an organized, kid-friendly way to store them all.

Because all of the cards are laminated with velcro on the back, I velcro them onto colored cardstock. These sheets of cardstock are alphabetized and organized by initial, medial, and final position. If I ever need a set for a certain kid, I pull that page out and bring it to therapy. The kids I’ve done this with are responsible for making sure all of the cards get stuck back onto their respective sheets of cardstock by the end of the day. Having the kids put the cards away is a great activity for phonemic awareness as well! “Does the ‘car’ need to go with the /k/ page, or the /s/ page?”. Win-win!

I hope some of these ideas were helpful for you! Thanks for reading! 🙂

If you are interested in staying up to date on freebies, giveaways, and new posts, ‘like’ me on Facebook here.