The Best Therapy Materials for School SLPs & Clinical Fellows
As school SLPs and Clinical Fellows (CFs) heading into another school year, you can prepare yourself for success by determining the best therapy materials to use with your students. A robust collection of materials and activities will ensure you diversify treatment sessions, and that your students have fun while they learn.
To help inspire exciting interactions and support progression toward student goals this year, AMN Healthcare Clinical Managers, Carolyn Bledsoe MS, CCC-SLP and Maggie Keys MS, CCC-SLP, and Senior Director of Teletherapy, Jennifer Martin MS, CCC-SLP, have compiled some fun and effective speech therapy materials to add to your collection.
Top Speech Therapy Materials for School SLPs and CFs
Websites
The internet can be a treasure trove of options for school SLPs and CFs—offering a wide variety of free and paid resources to build activities for students of all ages.
GoNoodle – GoNoodle is a free website offering lessons about personal and community wellness, mental and physical health, and more through various types of music and videos. This is a great resource to use for elementary school students.
Boom Cards – Boom Cards is an incredibly popular paid resource among students and teachers, offering interactive lessons that are gamified for enhanced student engagement. Adding automatic grading and real-time reports, Boom Cards is excellent for students of all ages.
Everyday Speech – Everyday Speech is a powerful SEL and social skills tool, offering pragmatic language and social skills curricula tailored to each of your student’s unique needs. The no-prep, customizable materials make this a top choice for students of all ages and skill levels.
Epic Books – Epic books is a wonderful library of reading materials for all student ages, offering stories from any topic and reading level, customized to your students. Epic offers a free subscription permitting access to one story per day, or paid subscriptions for unlimited stories.
YouTube Videos
Videos are an amazing resource to simultaneously engage students and teach valuable lessons across all age groups.
Pixar – Pixar, the renowned CGI production company, offers a collection of short videos on YouTube that are highly effective in teaching communication, including:
These are a few of Pixar’s short films available on YouTube. All of the shorts contain no words, so you can have your students explain what is happening—these are also great for identifying feelings from facial expressions and provide humor for your students to enjoy.
Mercer Mayer Story Books – Mercer Mayer is a published children’s author, whose works are available as read-aloud stories on YouTube. These stories help teach younger and older students about different aspects of life through the friendly lens of little critters.
Additional YouTube Options:
The Chihuahua and the Chicken | Unlikely Animal Friends – for students from kindergarten through high school.
Idioms and Their Meanings – for students suited from elementary through high school.
For older students, you can implement YouTube video clips of age-appropriate shows to answer “wh-” questions and discuss pragmatics.
Practical Materials
While online resources offer amazing flexibility and streamlined processes for therapists, learning objectives should also be reinforced through practical activities in the classroom or virtual space.
Executive Functioning Programs – Organize a series of tasks that focus on executive functioning skills—i.e., organizational forms for homework, assistance with using a planner or calendar, and other activities to assist with organization. These are best suited for middle school students and above.
Grade Level Vocabulary – Depending on your student population, compile vocabulary word lists and practical activities to pair with them, such as researching different words on the internet to gain better understanding.
Toys – Toys are usually best for elementary and pre-K students, but can sometimes be used for slightly older students depending on ability. Examples such as Mr. Potato Head, bubbles, toy farm or house, and others can help demonstrate cause and effect while adding fun to therapy sessions.
Board & Card Games – Board games are most effective for grade school level students. Examples like Candy Land, Chutes and Ladders, Go fish, and Guess Who are fun and effective ways to promote understanding of rules and work toward goals.
Craft Activities – Arts and crafts like pipe cleaners, googly eyes, markers, paints, and to-do activities are amazing to reinforce sequencing, vocabulary, and other language objectives. They can also be great methods for giving and receiving directions with barrier games.
These are just a small collection of the materials you can add to your speech therapy sessions to start your school year off on the right foot and encourage student engagement, no matter which population you are working with.