Sometimes our students with speech sound disorders are NOT digging our drill and kill activities. And, if our students aren’t motivated to practice their speech sound goals, progress suffers. What if I told you that there are games that are sound loaded to help you embed a LOT of practice with your student’s goals? In this blog post, I will share the BEST s-blends speech therapy games to get high trials in your speech sessions.

Tips for Targeting S-blends With Games

When you pull out a therapy game, you want to find ways to use the game pieces to target s-blends before playing, during, and after the game is over.

One of the easiest ways is to have your students practice a set of words or phrases before taking each turn.

Or, you can have a list of s-blends related to the game to have your students say while playing.

I pull out my toy and game cheat sheet to help me remember s-blend targets to use with a game. It helps save so much brain energy and keeps therapy moving along.

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S-blends Game #1 – Yeti in My Spaghetti

Get high trials in your speech therapy sessions with s-blends games listed in this blog post!
The title alone of this game makes it great to use in therapy! You can use several sound-loaded carrier phrases listed as follows:

  • Grab a spaghetti
  • Stay on top!
  • Slippery spaghetti
  • Keep steady!

You can also name your yeti a name with an s-blend consonant cluster you are trying to target with students.

Using Greedy Granny to Sneak in Some Practice

Because you have a spinner with this game, you can have students say, “I need to spin” or “Time to spin” before each turn.

Some other s-blend words that you can infuse into the gameplay are listed as follows:

swipe
spring
snooze
slide
sweets
swipe
spinner
scream
snore
startle
sneaky

The s-blends game you probably play often!

Candyland has a lot of s-blend words that occur on the game board. You can target stuck, spaces, sweet, swamp, step, stone, snowflake, and swirl while your students move along the board.

Each turn, you can have students practice their s-blend words for the number of spaces they moved. For example, if they picked an orange card and moved up five spaces, they could practice five words. For every turn, you can have them say, “I stepped on the orange square.” or whatever color they landed on the board game.

S-blends Game #4 to Use in Speech Therapy

The chutes and ladders game has lots of s-blend opportunities. If they land at the top of a chute or bottom of a ladder, you can have them practice their s-blends 10 or 20 times, depending on your rule. But if you need to embed s-blend words into your student’s turns, here is a list I came up with that would work well:

slide
square
still
spot
slip
space
start
snake
stop
scramble
stay
spin
spinner
scan

This game makes it so easy to target s-blends

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To get more trials with Sneaky Snacky Squirrel, you can have students earn an acorn for every production. Once they have all their acorns, you can play the game.

Then, during the game, you can have them use phrases such as “Spin me something good!” or “Stay away, sneaky squirrel.”

If you have a plush squirrel, or a squirrel mouth printable, you can have your students practice their s-blends while feeding the squirrel the acorns. You can have your students say, “Here’s a tasty snack.” or “I snatched an acorn for you.” as they feed the squirrel.

All of these s-blends games have a cheat sheet to help jog your memory when you are in therapy with your students. The entire resource has pre-selected targets for speech and language goals! Check it out here.

What games do you love to use to target s-blends?

If you can’t tell, I love using games to adapt in therapy for speech sound disorders. That’s why if you have a game that you love to use to target s-blends, let me know in the comments.

Keeping our students motivated to practice their speech sounds can be much easier when we find something they love! Get more therapy ideas for getting high trials in this blog post.

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