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Planning summer speech and language activities for preschoolers doesn’t have to be stressful! Using summer-themed play in your speech therapy sessions is a great way to keep preschool and kindergarten students engaged while targeting their speech and language goals. These summer speech therapy activities are designed with play-based learning in mind and can be used for both in-person and home practice. Whether you’re doing ESY or just looking for fun, low-prep ways to keep your sessions productive, these summer themes will help.
Using summer play themes in speech therapy sessions helps preschool and kindergarten students stay engaged while learning. Play-based activities tied to a fun summer theme make it easier to embed speech and language practice into natural, meaningful routines. Whether you’re targeting core vocabulary, answering WH-questions, or expanding sentence structure, themed play gives context and repetition in a motivating way.
If you want to use a theme-based approach, you can work on articulation and language goals while doing play themes related to summer. This approach supports generalization and reduces planning time across mixed groups of students.
During the summer, many of your students may be heading to the beach with family or friends—making it the perfect setting for playful, functional speech therapy. Beach pretend play offers a rich opportunity to work on a wide variety of summer speech and language activities for preschoolers in a natural way.
You can easily target semantic and vocabulary skills by categorizing beach-related items. Have students list and sort ocean animals, beach snacks, items you bring to the beach, and fun beach activities. This builds vocabulary while also reinforcing describing skills.
Take it a step further with sequencing practice: pretend you’re getting ready to go to the beach. What do you pack first? What happens when you arrive? This is a fun way to practice verbs, sequence words, and even temporal concepts like before and after.
You can also work on following directions and language comprehension using basic concepts. Try giving students multi-step directions with location words (e.g., “Put the towel next to the bucket” or “First pack your sunscreen, then grab your flip-flops”).
For carryover, provide families with ideas for a DIY beach sensory bin. Suggest they bring a small bin to the beach and fill it with sand, water, shells, or toys. While the child plays, parents can practice simple language tasks like naming items, using action words, or following directions. It’s a great way to support generalization of skills in a meaningful context.
If you want to create the ocean sensory bin pictured above for your sessions, you’ll need:
This easy-to-prep summer speech therapy activity can target both articulation and language goals while giving kids a hands-on way to learn.
S’mores, ice cream, and lemonade—yum! These summer treats make the perfect inspiration for engaging summer speech and language activities for preschoolers. Kids love them, and they offer endless opportunities to build language through pretend play.
Set up play scenarios where students pretend they’re going to an ice cream shop, camping with s’mores, or selling lemonade at a stand. These summer-themed speech therapy activities support vocabulary growth, sequencing, and imaginative play.
You can also target a variety of social communication goals, such as:
These playful setups make it easy to embed meaningful language practice into your summer sessions.
The ice cream and camping themes are available in the Themed Therapy SLP membership, offering done-for-you materials to support your planning all summer long.
Looking to stock your therapy room or home with props? These pretend play sets pair perfectly:
For creative ways to use an ice cream toy set in speech therapy, you can explore activities that incorporate requesting, describing, and sequencing. Using cloud dough or Play-Doh is another fun way to simulate scooping and serving for pretend play sessions focused on ice cream.
There are also tons of opportunities to embed language practice into camping and s’mores speech therapy activities. These themes are perfect for working on vocabulary, story retell, and spatial concepts during play-based sessions.
If you’re looking for easy ways to support carryover at home, these Summer Play-Based Speech Therapy Parent Handouts are a must-have! This low-prep resource includes homework packets filled with fun, functional ideas that families can do using common toys and materials they already have at home.
Each handout includes suggestions for summer speech and language activities that target articulation, vocabulary, grammar, and more—all through play. These are perfect for ESY, sending home for the summer break, or supplementing your sessions.
The activities align with a theme-based approach and are designed specifically for preschool and kindergarten students who benefit from play-based learning.
Learning Resources has a lemonade stand themed card game that can easily be used in speech therapy.
I would recommend checking out Amazon’s lemonade toy set that is currently under $15 and great for a lemonade pretend play activity.
You can also make a lemonade sensory bin with lemon scented rice.
Have a summer picnic with your student and work on categorizing food by fruits, snacks, and entrees. Additionally, you can use a basket work on basic concepts like in/out, in front/behind, over, under. You can also incorporate those social skills I mentioned earlier.
Pretend to visit a farmers market with your students. Talk about the produce you would see and what you would need to bring with you. Once you are done, talk about the produce that you saw and bought to work on vocabulary and verb tensing.
If you need more play food ideas for preschool speech therapy, head to this blog post.
Use a garden or car wash theme to make sensory bins to target your students goals. Fill a bin with water, soap, and cars or trucks of different sizes and colors. List the attributes or the cars and work on basic concepts as the cars and trucks go in and out of the car wash.
You can also fill a bin with some soil, grass, and seeds. Have your student push the seeds and look for small bugs and critters! There are a lot of bug hunt toy sets that can be incorporates into this sensory bin.
Use fake flowers and other gardening supplies to create a pretend play theme of a flower shop or planting a garden. This can be a great opportunity to talk about the vocabulary and social communication of growing flowers and buying flowers for others. Buying flowers can teach the concept of giving, showing love with gifts as well as the verbs and vocabulary for making a flower bouquet. This is also a time to practice emotion words with your students! How would someone feel if you gave them flowers? How would someone feel if you didn’t give them flowers?
For more ideas on how to use flowers as a theme in speech therapy, head to this blog post.
Here are some more summer theme ideas to use for pretend play. You can target all of the previously mentioned therapy goals using these themes:
If you’re interested in more seasonal themes, check out my spring play themes blog post.
I would also recommend reading this previous post for more information on play based speech therapy!
When I first began incorporating play based activities into my therapy, I felt very overwhelmed. I quickly began to run out of ideas on how to incorporate my students’ goals in play without being repetitive or burnt out. I have found that when I have cheat sheets handy in my sessions, I spend less time thinking of targets and more time meaningfully interacting with my students. If you want to save more brain energy AND feel prepared for play therapy without hours of planning, then grab these toy companion cheat sheets for speech and language therapy. Included are cheat sheet guides for over 25 toys!
I always love to hear what other SLP’s are doing with their student. Have any summer themed activities you’ve tried and loved with your students? Let me know in the comments!
