If the weather is nice in the spring and summer months, taking speech therapy outside can be just what you need to re-engage your students! In today’s Real Talk SLP podcast, I am sharing LOTS of easy outdoor speech therapy activities you can do that don’t scrimp on targeting speech and language goals. It’s okay to ditch the worksheets and target goals outside in a naturalistic setting. I hope you find some new outdoor speech therapy activities you can use with your Prek-5th grade caseload!
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Summer Speech Therapy Activities for Prek-5th
For SLPs working this summer with private clients or during ESY services (summer school) make therapy planning easier with ready-to-go summer speech therapy activities you can use with Prek-5th grade.
If you need push-in lessons to rock ESY services, this language lesson plan bundle has everything you need to love working summer school without stress!
The Themed Therapy SLP Membership has themes for pets, beach, food, water activities, sports, and ice cream for June and July!
Outdoor Speech Therapy Activities Shared in the Episode:
- Go on an I spy nature walk or a bug hunt (look for real bugs or toss some fake ones in the grass). Get some I Spy speech and language activities that you can do outside on the playground or yard. Get your free I Spy language games to use in therapy and to coach parents.
- Play Red light, Green light outside and work on fast/slow, AAC CORE words go/stop, teach colors, or pick words that have your student’s speech sounds. For more variations, Empowered Parents has some good suggestions.
- Do art projects you can take outdoors to work on speech and language goals like this –windsock craft
- Use sidewalk chalk to do hopscotch, play chalk Boggle, write answer choices to hop to when asked, and more!
- Head to the school’s playground to do beach ball prepositions, make an obstacle course and target basic and spatial concepts with the playground equipment.
- Who doesn’t LOVE bubbles? There are many ways to adapt bubbles, and it’s a lot more fun under the sun. Relay races or challenges to target basic concepts, wh-questions, spatial concepts
- Bring your toys outside. Do therapy at a picnic table or on the grass. You can do the same toy activities but just change up the scenery.
- Plan a pretend or real picnic for a whole class lesson.
- Go visit the school’s garden or plant flowers outside. For more info on how to teach the plant life cycle, check out this blog post.
- Do pool noodle tag to work on social communication, “who questions” such as “Who is it?” or every time someone tags a person, they have to say their challenge word that has their speech sound.
What Outside Speech Therapy Activities Could You Plan?
If you have any fun games or activity ideas for doing speech therapy outside, share them in the comments. It’s always great to get more ideas for increasing engagement with your students. There is something about going outside that is motivating for kids. Plus, you can’t beat the vitamin D, either!
EP 98 Easy Outdoor Speech Therapy Activities for Elementary
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