Whether you are seeing your students in person, providing teletherapy, or doing a little bit of both, these are the best summer-themed youtube videos for your summer therapy plans.
When exploring summer fun, you can find reading passages about summer, weather concepts, going to the beach, ocean animals, and outdoor activities. Themed reading passages are a great way to work on tiered vocabulary, listening and reading comprehension, story grammar, sequencing, identifying the main idea, and recalling important details. Varying your supports and finding passages with your student’s speech sound are a plus! This will help you plan a great mixed group lesson for your students.
As always, www.readworks.org or www.getepic.com are great places to find books and passages for your summer theme. Summer videos are great companions to those passages or an alternative lesson plan to the reading passages all together.
You can use summer videos to help organize your therapy sessions with engaging content. In this blog post, I will be sharing some of my favorite summer videos for teletherapy.
Summer YouTube Videos for Teletherapy
You can kick-off your summer-themed lessons with this fun video about the sun and the seasons from Crash Course Kids. This video uses an engaging poem to help build background knowledge about seasons. With this video are 5 additional videos which you can break up over the course of an entire month to target vocabulary and language. These videos are great for a 20-30 minute session since they aren’t too lengthy.
This Scishow kids video is great for learning about the importance of sunscreen!
Practice Social Skills Using Summer Videos
These Simon’s cat summer videos are a fun way to target those nonverbal social skills with your students. I like to use these videos when we’re practicing facial expressions and body language. My student and I talk about how the animals are feeling in the videos.
If you want to see how you can use Simon’s Cat videos to target a variety of goals, check out this BLOG POST.
I also like to use the animated videos when practicing inferences with my students. These are fun summer themed videos to practice this skill.
Summer Videos Using YouTube Book Read Aloud Videos
Shared story book readings are a great home activity to support your students’ generalization of language concepts. Even though reading the actual book is preferred, sometimes my families don’t have access to a variety of themed books. Especially now with many libraries still closed. YouTube read alouds are a perfect alternative for students. They will still have access to the story, keep learning about summer, and increase their language building opportunities at home.
To make sure that it’s still a shared story reading, encourage families to keep the YouTube video on mute so that they can read the pages. I try to find book read alouds that show clear pages so that families can read the lines from the story.
This is a great home carryover activity, but it can also be a great therapy lesson. Pause the read aloud and talk about what your student sees on the page. I also like to ask my students what they think will come next or how this story goes along with our summer theme.
Other ways to use books are by screen sharing while projecting a book from Kindle Unlimited, Vooks, or using Epic. If you’re looking for some more summer books ideas, check out my list of books for targeting summer vocabulary.
Get Up And Moving With Your Students
It’s summer and the perfect time to go outside and get moving! Use these fun, summer-themed songs to have a movement break with your students during your sessions. These songs are great to use for your whole group lessons as a warm-up or when you can see your kids are struggling to pay attention.
Use these songs and videos to target seasons, summer vocabulary, and basic concepts in a way that’s fun and engaging for your students. I like to also have my younger students work on requesting and imitation with these movement breaks.
Don’t forget to check out the Frozen song video (who doesn’t love Olaf?). Share in the comments what songs you like to use with your students.
If you want all these summer songs in one place as well as more of my faves, grab this free summer YouTube Google Slides by clicking the pink button.
Use Google Slides to Organize Your Summer Videos
One way you can keep all your favorite videos organized is by adding them to a Google Slide or PowerPoint. I find that adding them to Google Slides is easier for sharing with educators or families. Once you add in all the video links, you can easily navigate to the ones you need for the lesson.
Once you have it organized, you can use it year after year with your groups. If you need all of these videos in an organized Google Slides presentation, grab my summer-themed language lesson plan guides that have a Google Slides™ presentation included. It comes with everything ready to go.
You can see how you can organize your videos and activities in the video below.
What summer videos have you found and included in your summer lessons? I would love to add them to my collection of materials! Share in the comments.