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Looking to keep your therapy sessions fun, functional, and themed during the summer months? Using summer books for speech therapy is one of the easiest ways to plan engaging lessons that target multiple goals. Whether you’re working in ESY (Extended School Year), running private sessions, or sending home materials, pairing summer-themed books with speech and language activities can bring joy and structure to your caseload.
I love incorporating books into speech therapy. It is the easiest way for me to teach themed vocabulary without having to prep anything! Summer books are filled with picture scenes that have summer vocabulary to teach. I don’t think I could ever have enough books to teach summer vocabulary! #professionalbookhoarder
In this post, I’m sharing some of my favorite summer books for speech therapy, along with ideas for how to use them across a range of goals.
Books are a fantastic tool for building vocabulary, narrative skills, grammar, comprehension, and social language. Choosing stories that align with the season adds an extra layer of engagement.
SLPs love using summer books because they:
Align with themes like beach, camping, water play, and summer fun
Pair easily with crafts, sensory bins, and story maps
Make it easy to plan mixed group sessions with minimal prep
When working with students to improve their vocabulary, the research shows that focusing on building a deep vocabulary will help students learn new words because they can add those new words into a system or category a child knows well. There is also research that shows that students with language impairments need up to 36 engagements with a word before they learn it. So, as clinicians, implementing themed therapy can be a great approach to building a depth of knowledge for vocabulary. This gives us permission to use a summer theme for longer than a week because the more engagements with words, the better our students will learn a deep knowledge of that vocabulary.
Furthermore, if your teachers are also incorporating summer-themed books into their curriculum and daily class readings, we are helping to give more exposure and discussion with those words when our students come to the speech room. Plus, most students have experienced a summer season. By picking a theme that is relatable, it will help your students draw from their own experiences with the summer concepts and vocabulary.
You can see some of the research articles at the end of this blog post that specifically look at vocabulary intervention. Learn more about shared book reading strategies to help boost vocabulary!
Books also provide way more opportunities for you to target other language skills, such as inference, predicting, grammar, articulation practice and carryover, story retell, and narrative comprehension.
The cool thing about using a summer theme to plan therapy is that you can incorporate a new summer-themed book every 1-2 weeks. You will keep students engaged by reading a new story while still choosing a book that builds off of previously taught vocabulary.
For students with language disorders, selecting summer books for speech therapy can help build their vocabulary skills. To help your students build stronger vocabularies, here are some strategies you can use to teach vocabulary with literature:
When looking summer speech therapy books, think about how you would use these strategies with the book.
When building depth of knowledge using a taxonomy approach, you are deconstructing a word by category, sub-category, function, location, size, shape, texture, parts, etc. For example, with the word “popsicle,” you could explain that it is a food and/or that it is a type of cold dessert. A popsicle can be eaten, it melts, and it often comes on a stick. A popsicle is made up of ingredients that are blended together and frozen. You keep popsicles in a freezer until you want to eat one.
As you are reading the book, you can use dialogic reading techniques to facilitate language discussion around the words. After reading the book, you can set up summer play activities that are related to the book’s concepts and/or theme to encourage students to act out the concepts from the book. Sensory bins, pretend play, toys, or props for story retell can work great to engage your students.
Ernestine is invited to go on her very first camping trip. Although she is excited and packed thoroughly for camping, Ernestine has to learn how to set up a tent and what it is like to be out in the wilderness. This is a great story about a little girl who has to navigate a new environment that brings challenges. Even though camping is, at times, uncomfortable for Ernestine, she learns how to make lasting memor
Camping is a favorite pastime for a lot of people during the summer months! A Camping Spree with Mr. Magee is a great book to teach about all those camping vocabulary words. It has fun, vivid pictures; a bear; a camper; Mr. Magee; and his cute dog, Dee.
If you need camping resources to pair with this book, I have some fun camping activities, including a S’mores craftivity, in my Summer Craftivity Set! You can also make a fun lantern craft. Check out my tutorial for how to make a lantern by clicking the YouTube video (I know it is for Chinese New Year, but I use that craft for camping lanterns, too).
We have book cheat sheets, book companions, and story maps with these camping summer books for speech therapy in the Themed Therapy SLP membership.
If you are looking for summer books for speech therapy about going to the beach, here are a few that are engaging and make it easy to cover vocabulary and other language goals:
I love using When a Dragon Moves In to teach beach-themed vocabulary, to work on inferencing, and to work on perspective-taking. This book is all about a boy who is pretending that his sandcastle has a dragon inside it. He talks all about the things he does at the beach with the dragon. The boy’s family doesn’t seem to believe him when he tells them that it is the dragon who is eating the brownies and spraying sand at his sister. The pictures are very colorful, and it is a great book to discuss pretend versus real.
If you want a book with a summer theme that is good for working on oral narration and story comprehension, The Sandcastle Contest is a great book to work on those skills! This book is all about cool sandcastles, so it is a pretty engaging book for students. I have a buried in sand craftivity that would go great with this book!
Beach Day is probably my most favorite beach-themed book! It is written with a rhyme sentence structure, so it isn’t that long of a book. Why I LOVE the book is because the pictures are filled with lots of people and activities that a person may do at the beach. It is great for teaching beach vocabulary, as well as for creating sentences about what the people are doing. I love that this could help with teaching word associations, and the visual supports are already built in with the book, so you don’t have to worry about preparing visuals for your lesson.
To make summer speech therapy planning easier, we provide book cheat sheets, companion resources, story maps and extension activities to pair with these beach summer books for speech therapy in the Themed Therapy SLP membership. We have this unit available in June or if you sign up for the annual subscription, you can access the beach theme at anytime!
So many of our students do activities over the summer months that helping them making personal connections with those activities through books can strengthen their background knowledge about the summer season and build vocabulary. Here are some of my FAVE summer books for speech therapy:
Jabari Jumps is a sweet tale about a young boy who is ready to jump off the diving board. Jabari has passed his swimming test and now has to figure out how he can overcome his fear of jumping off the diving board. Kids can relate to this book as many take swim lessons over the summer and also have fears of jumping off the diving board. You can also work on /dj/ when reading this story.
If you like to talk about a lot of different activities people do over the summer, then Let It Shine is the perfect book to read with your students. This book is great for answering themed wh- questions. They cover Fourth of July, baseball games, the beach, swimming, camping, and more in this book!
This is a great book for Pre-K and kindergarten that talks about what happens during a big heat wave in the summer months. The book uses real photos, so children can relate to the words used about summer. For many children, hot summer days are just ordinary days filled with fans, popsicles, and trying to stay cool in the shade.
The Night Before Summer Vacation by Natasha Wing
Lots of children go on vacation during the summer months. The Night Before Summer Vacation is a book that talks all about what happens the night before kids go on summer vacation.
Need support planning lessons around summer-themed books? Inside my Themed Therapy SLP membership, you’ll find:
Book cheat sheets for quick planning
Book companions with vocabulary, WH questions, grammar, and sequencing
Story maps and extension crafts
Materials for camping, beach, and summer fun themes
These tools help you cover goals while keeping things fun and low prep—perfect for summer therapy sessions.
