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!