If you are wanting to plan effective speech therapy lessons, but are limited on time, then this blog post is for you. St. Patrick’s Day is a holiday coming up in March. You can use the St. Patrick’s Day speech therapy activities in this blog post to quickly find materials for your whole elementary caseload.
When I have a wide-range of ages and goals, themes help me to narrow my focus on planning. It helps take the overwhelm out of planning activities. Plus, I love seeing kids get engaged with my themes.
Today, I am sharing LOTs of speech and language activities to use for St. Patrick’s Day!
St. Patrick’s Day Books for Speech Therapy
Use some festive St. Patrick’s Day books in your therapy sessions. Work on vocabulary, grammar, wh-questions, story retell, and inferencing with these books.
Here are some of my fave books to use (amazon affiliate links provided):
Ten Lucky Leprechauns by Kathryn Heling and Deborah Hembrook
How to Trap a Leprechaun by Sue Fliess and Emm Randall
There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Clover by Lucille Colandro
How to Catch a Leprechaun by Adam Wallace
The Night Before St. Patrick’s Day by Natasha Wing
After I read the themed book, I plan extension activities to cover grammar and vocabulary goals. We work on noun-verb agreement, basic concepts, answering wh-questions and describing vocabulary using my St. Patick’s Day grammar and vocabulary activities.
I also use my St. Patrick’s Day language lesson plan guides to cover my whole class and small group lessons. You can read more about how I structure those lessons HERE.
St. Patrick’s Day Push-In Lesson Plans
For my push-in lessons, I do a whole class read aloud with a quick circle time activity. Then, we break up into small group stations. I plan three different stations and have myself and teachers faciliate a station. At my station, I make sure to do targeted practice for my students goals.
The other two stations target language goals as well, but have cheat sheet guides for the teachers to help them implement the lesson. Catch the Leprechaun noun-functions and green items category sort are examples of language stations I would plan for two of the stations. Read more about structuring your push-in sessions in this blog post HERE.
Non-Fiction Passages for St. Patrick’s Day
Read Works is a free site that you can access St. Patrick’s Day articles. I use these articles with my older elementary students including this rainbow non-fiction passage. This site also includes vocabulary to target and wh-questions with answer choices. If I need progress monitoring data, I can collect data on listening comprehension in a quick second! You can also find articles on NewsELA.
St. Patrick’s Day Crafts for Speech Therapy
I am a big fan of using crafts when I have the time to prep them. They can be used to naturally target goals and can be sent home for additional practice. Additionally, many crafts can be adapted to use with mixed groups. Check out my windsock craft to see how I adapted to cover a lot of goals. I found this cute Shamrock man you can make in speech.
If you need some St. Patrick’s Day craft inspiration, this video has lots of fun, easy to prep ideas.
Rainbow Crafts for Speech Therapy
Make a rainbow craft that you can have students write or glue their speech or language targets on the different colors of the rainbow. It can be a great bulletin board display!
Or make this rainbow craft and work on following directions after you create it! You can target above, under, next to, in front and behind with this fun rainbow craft.
St. Patrick’s Day YouTube Videos for Speech Therapy
YouTube is your lesson planning friend! There are a lot of videos that discuss the history of St. Patrick’s Day.
Use EdPuzzle to create lesson plan questions with your videos. You plan the questions, and vocabulary you want to discuss with EdPuzzle, then show the video to your students. The video will automatically pause when it gets your question. Plan your lesson once and use over and over again!
St. Patrick’s Day Sensory Bins
Since part of the St. Patrick’s Day holiday is about wearing green, why not talk about green items! I use this green sensory bin companion from my St. Patrick’s Day Language Lesson Plan Guides to work on describing nouns by attributes. You can also see how I made a green sensory bin using toys/items around my speech room HERE.
I also love making a “Find the gold” sensory bin. This is a reinforcer bin to use with your mixed groups. You can put plastic gold coins from the Dollar Tree in the bin and a construction paper rainbow. Then, students roll a die. Whatever number they roll, that is how many gold coins they get to collect. The student practices their target skill and then the next student takes a turn. Whoever has the most gold coins at the end, wins! At the end of the game, you can work on who has more/less/most gold for some additional language practice!
Social Skill Idea for St. Patrick’s Day
For our speech students working on thinking about others, you can go on a “Catch the Leprechaun” school hunt. Print up these free clue cards from Cupcake for a Teacher and place them around the school. The last clue can have a pot of gold or a chocolate treat for your students. As you walk around the school, students have to follow the group plan and keep their bodies in the group. Check out this post to see how you can do this with The Gingerbread Man.
St. Patrick’s Day Idioms
Use St. Patrick’s Day idioms to work on figurative language. You can focus on idioms that relate to getting rich, being lucky and looking green! Here are a list of idioms you can teach your students.
- To thank ones lucky stars
- To hit the jackpot
- To luck out
- Goldmine
- Green with envy
- Give someone the green light
- Have a green thumb
- To feel green around the gills
What Activities Do You Plan for St. Patrick’s Day in Speech Therapy?
I would love to hear all the creative and engaging ways you plan therapy for St. Patrick’s day! Please share your best therapy ideas or tips in the comments or email me at feliceclark@thedabblingspeechie.com. Of course, you can always share a pic on Instagram and tag me @thedabblingspeechie. In my opinion, an SLP can never have to many therapy materials!