Good Speech & Yummy Treats!

Have you ever done any cooking activities with your students? There are so many opportunities for great speech and language while creating something yummy in the kitchen. To celebrate the start of spring, we whipped up some popsicles!

These popsicles are healthy and are created with only a few ingredients: strawberries, yogurt, and honey. This is a great way to work on vocabulary, following directions, requesting, and social skills.. especially if you are cooking with a group. This would also be a fantastic activity to use with students who are receiving feeding therapy. Any time you can make food fun, you are making progress!

 Check out the video below for directions on how to make these strawberry yogurt popsicles!

5,000 Facebook Followers Giveaway!

Happy Monday! I hope you all had a fantastic weekend. We spent the weekend visiting friends that were in town and celebrating my nephew's first birthday. Lots of friends, family, and love! Speaking of love… Simply Speech has been getting a lot of love lately with 5,000 Facebook followers! To celebrate this exciting milestone and to show my appreciation for all of you, I am hosting a giveaway.

If you don't already follow Simply Speech on Instagram, go head over there now. I am giving away 5 $10 Teachers Pay Teachers gift certificates. To enter, follow simply speech on Instagram and tag 3 friends in the giveaway post. Winners will be announced on Wednesday. Good luck!!

St. Patrick's Day Craftivity

I've probably said it 1,000 times, but I love craftivities! I love using them in therapy because the kids are able to get creative and have some hands on learning. My latest craftivity was created just in time for St. Patrick's Day!

I've made this activity available for free in my Teacher's Pay Teacher's store. Click on any of the pictures to go directly to it. The download includes one black and white printable worksheet with a leprechaun and 10 clovers. It is purposely left open ended so you can use it to target almost any goal you are working on.

 Last week I used it to target articulation. I printed and cut out target words from the Mommy Speech Therapy website and had my students practice their target words or make up a sentence for the words before they glued them onto the clovers.

 This was a simple, low prep activity that was a lot of fun. These worksheets were also sent home for homework since the target words were already there and ready for practice!

Expanding Utterances with Smash Mats!

Smash mats have been so motivating for my students. I use them to target all kinds of speech and language goals. The kids get excited and I get to elicit lots of practice… it's a win, win! I recently have been working with a little girl on expanding her utterance length and was having trouble motivating her. So seeing how excited she got about using smash mats to target other goals, I created these for her!

Here is how we use them… I printed and laminated the sentence strips. I have strips for 2, 3, 4, and 5 word utterances. Depending on what we are working on,  I will write a target phrase in the empty circles that I want her to imitate. As she says each word, she is able to smash the ball of playdoh that is under the word. 

 A few weeks ago, we were reading There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Rose to get ready for Valentine's Day. As we read the story, we would periodically pause the story and create a phrase about what was happening ("she swallowed some glitter!") We got lots of phrase practice in this way.

These strips are also ideal to send home with the kids for practice with their families. If they don't happen to have playdoh, they can put a sticker on the smash mat or eat a small treat after they say each word… whatever motivates them! 

You can download these mats for free in my TpT store, here!