One thing I struggle with is eliciting target speech sounds during less structured activities—-that step when you want more than single words or phrases…but know that errors creep back in in conversation (well, and eliciting them in conversation can also be challenging to do/tricky to keep accurate data on). Play-based activities can be great (e.g. playing with a toy farm to elicit many opportunities to produce initial /f/, legos for medial /g/, having child request different cars for /k/, constructing a snowman for s-blends, etc.), but sometimes I really like to get in more practice!
One way to do this is to a) have a child try to retell a story you’ve read together (another reason I love using picture books during therapy) or b) to use stories specifically made with your artic target in mind. I started making some stories of my own after finding Heidi Hanks’s (of Mommy Speech Therapy) so helpful. She has free downloads for the word, sentence, and story level for most sounds, and her app (Articulation Station) is structured the same way. The app also has “Level 2″ stories for older students who don’t need the visual aids (and both levels have a few comprehension questions after each story).
Below are some of the “stories” I’ve made up using Boardmaker. With primarily pre-K students, my kids aren’t reading, so having visual aids helps them to retell the story (I usually read it first). I hope they’re helpful! Will have to make up some new ones soon…
s-blends: st- initial, sw- initial, sk- initial Scooby Doo, sk- Scaredy Squirrel, -st final
Love the new blog! Great ideas and pictures. Have tried some ideas and my kids loved them. Keep up the good ideas!
YES this is great! I too have made up stories in the past to work on this! And guess what? your post was #1 most clicked link at Thrifty Thursday last week! Way to go!
I love the stories. If anyone has a story with initial/medial/final bilabials, I would love to see it! Thank you.
Thanks! I don’t as of now, but would recommend the ones over on Mommy Speech Therapy! http://mommyspeechtherapy.com/?page_id=55
Thank you! This is so helpful for the grade schoolers I’m working with at my full-time school placement.