Who loves low-prep speech therapy activities that cover a LOT of goals? And keeps your students engaged? Um, we are all raising our hands right now. If you have yet to hear of the wordless short Simon’s Cat videos, you need to check them out. In fact, I am going to tell ya all the goods about how to use the Simon’s Cat videos in speech therapy. Reading this blog post will make planning for mixed groups a WHOLE lot easier.
What Are Simon’s Cat Videos?
Simon’s Cat is a series of comic strip animated short videos that you can find on YouTube. The videos are primarily without words and are in black and white. You can watch these videos on your iPhone, iPad, laptop, or computer to target many different skills! If you are worried about ads and unwanted images popping up during your lesson, I recommend watching Simon’s Cat videos with safe tube. Safe tube is free and allows parents and educators to watch videos without the ads. If you need internet at your school site, there is now a Simon’s Cat comic book!! You can get it on amazon HERE. This is an amazon affiliate link.

Why Simon’s Cat Videos For Speech Therapy
- These videos are free—less money to spend on Therapy materials.
- There are a ton of videos. Seasonal-themed and generic, I can use them in speech therapy all year long.
- You can use Simon’s Cat videos across a variety of ages. I have used them with 1st-8th grade. You could also test them out among the high school ages.
- I like watching them. Therapy always seems more exciting if I enjoy the resource because I am excited to talk about the videos.
- You can use Simon’s Cat Videos with your mixed groups. Planning for each student in my groups can be challenging because I have to find different activities and then manage the group to stay on task. Having one resource to cover everyone’s goals increases on-task behavior.
- The setting in the video is usually Simon’s house, and the characters are a man and a cat. I know that in many of the videos, my students have exposure to the vocabulary, so I don’t have to spend much time around schemes and background knowledge.
- These videos are short! They are only 2-3 minutes long so you can get through them in a 30-minute session.
How To Simon’s Cat Speech Therapy Ideas
There are many ways to use Simon’s Cat videos in speech therapy. You can structure your speech therapy session to use the video the entire time or break up your session. For example, do a 5-minute warm-up, teach some vocabulary words for 5 minutes, and then show the Simon’s Cat video for the remaining 10-15 minutes to target goals.

Use Cheat Sheets with Simon’s Cat Wordless Short Videos
If you need quick speech therapy lesson plans for mixed groups that you can use with younger and older students, check out these seasonal Simon’s Cat speech therapy cheat sheets.
They come with 3-page cheat sheets for winter, Valentine’s day, spring, summer, fall & Thanksgiving, and Christmas!
And there are sentence strips, graphic organizers, and visual supports to help you cover a TON of speech and language goals.
Try out the One the Fence Simon’s Cat speech therapy cheat sheet by clicking the pink button.
Articulation Speech Therapy Ideas

- During the video, you can have the students write down or tell you words they saw or heard with their speech sounds. After the video, they can say each word five times or use it in a sentence. You can also write a cheat sheet of target words from the video.
- The SLP can have the student answer comprehension questions from the video with their target speech sounds.
- Summarize the video using the target words from the video with their best speech sounds.
Language Speech Therapy Ideas
- Work on narrative comprehension and oral narration using these videos. Jot down some comprehension questions from the video before the students arrive to discuss the video. Have students work on storytelling by adding details on what would happen next if the video didn’t end. If you need some graphic organizers to help with this, grab this free set from KiwiSpeech HERE or Speech Time Fun’s summarizing graphic organizer HERE.

- The SLP can help their students build more complex sentences using the video. Watch the video and then have the students describe the parts of speech they see in the video. If you want more information about effective grammar intervention, check out this blog post I did with some research I found.
- Teach and show vocabulary with these videos. The SLP can pick target vocabulary words to teach from the video. During the speech therapy session, target antonyms, synonyms, word associations, attributes, and adjectives to describe items in the video.
- Discuss the main idea of the video and work on making a new video title for the video.
- Teach specific grammar concepts such as third-person singular, pronouns, plurals, verb tense, and noun-verb agreement.
- If you need cheat sheets to remember all these ways of using the Simon’s Cat videos, check out these Simon’s Cat speech therapy cheat sheets to use throughout the year.
Social Skills Simon’s Cat Speech Therapy Ideas
- What are they thinking about? Work on teaching that our eyes give people clues about their thoughts. Have your students identify what the characters are thinking based on where their eyes are looking.
- Use the videos to have students identify emotions and non-verbal body language. Have your students explain how the characters feel and what clues they noticed, such as eyes widening, smiling face, or body hunched over.
- Perspective taking- work on students explaining what people could be feeling or thinking in the video.
- Social inferences and predictions are a way for us to figure out what someone may do next, so we can figure out what to say or do in a social situation.
- Conversation – have your students watch the video and then have them discuss what they liked/didn’t like about the video.
- Thinking/Talking bubble – These wordless short videos are perfect for working on what people are thinking and what could be in their talking bubble. Make your speech and thinking bubble on a dry-erase board, or grab a dry-erase think bubble from the dollar store or on amazon HERE. (amazon affiliate link provided).
- Humor – these videos are hilarious and are perfect for discussing why they are funny!

How Do You Use the Simon’s Cat Videos?
How would you use Simon’s Cat videos in speech therapy? I would love to hear your therapy ideas.
https://www.edutopia.org/blog/ell-engagement-using-video-larry-ferlazzo-katie-hull-sypnieski
Scroll down to activity #2 … great for older students!