Treating the /r/ phoneme can be tricky, tiresome, and annoying for the clinician and student! I haven’t met an SLP at the elementary, middle, or high school level that doesn’t need more speech therapy R activities for their caseload. Today, I will share ten engaging R sound speech therapy activities to help you get those high trials in therapy.
Before practicing R at the syllable, word, sentence, or conversational level, you want to ensure you have established a solid /r/ production. It benefits no one to continue drilling /r/ when it isn’t an accurate production. If you need more resources to establish the /r/ phoneme, keep reading because I share some great tools!
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Feeling Defeated about Teaching the R Sound?
The best advice I got from a veteran SLP when I asked how to teach a child to say /r/ was, “Just grab a pair of gloves, a tongue depressor, and hope for the best!”
In his office video clip, Dwight Schrute sums up most SLPs’ feelings about the /r/ phoneme! He says, “R is one of the most menacing of sounds! That’s why they call it murder and not muck duck!” Those are my thoughts exactly, Dwight.
R Speech Therapy Techniques and Resources
If you are looking for manuals and guides for how to teach R to your student, Pam Marshalla has two excellent books. The first book is called Successful R Therapy: Fixing the Hardest Sound in the World. You will learn tips for how to help your student use their jaw, lips, and tongue together to produce r. Pam Marshalla also has The Marshalla Guide: A Topical Anthology of Speech Movement Techniques for Motor Speech Disorders & Articulation Deficits, which is a fantastic resource for a spectrum of speech sound disorders. Not only does she include techniques for remediating the /r/ phoneme, but Pam also shares various techniques for many speech sound disorders. If you serve a caseload with various speech sound disorders, this may be a better fit for your needs, whereas the Successful R Therapy book is excellent for SLPs who treat R often with students.
The Peachie Speechie has some great videos for how to teach r that you can use in therapy with your students.
Speech Therapy R Activities
Not having engaging speech therapy R sound activities for your sessions can make the day drag along! That’s why I am sharing a round-up of ten engaging prevocalic and vocalic r sound activities to help you keep students motivated to practice. If you need tips for encouraging R carryover into conversation, check out this blog post.
For word, carrier phrase, and sentence level R sound practice, check out the prevocalic and vocalic r activities flipbooks. You can get high trials while working on the vocalic r that your students are stimulable for using correctly.
2.Figuratively speeching has an excellent articulation placemat set that is great for sending home for additional practice. It provides activities for the whole week on one sheet with letters included to send home!
3.Whether you are doing teletherapy, in-person therapy, or need to build a speech home program, using the digital speech folders for R will help you customize syllable, word, sentence, and carryover activities in one spot! Once your student’s digital speech folder is set up, you can easily share the Google Slide presentation with the family or pull it up on your computer for ready-to-go therapy.
R Sentences Activities and R Activity Worksheets
4. Erik Raj has these super funMini homework sheets for articulation. These mini R articulation worksheets have great silly R sentence questions that students can read and discuss. One way to incorporate more R sentence level practice is to have your student ask a friend, teacher, and parent the silly question outside the speech therapy session.
5. To up your student’s motivation to practice R sentences, use the No Prep Articulation Sentence Challenge Sheets. Students will be excited to see if they can beat their last challenge score! Make sure your students go slow enough to achieve correct productions. Play 3 rounds to see if they can get more trials or correct productions.
R Words Sound Loaded Carrier Phrases
6. Need resources for R words sound loaded carrier phrases? Use the sentence strip visuals to practice R with similar carrier phrases such as “I want a ____.” or with sound-loaded R phrases for initial r, r-blends, and vocalic r.
Miss V’s Speech World has an incredible 52 Weekly /r/ homework worksheets product that helps you get sound-loaded R practice in your session and a one-page R worksheet to send home for weekly practice.
Speech Therapy R Activities for Carryover
8. To get those high trials when reading passages, you will have fiction and non-fiction passages ready using the R articulation carryover activities set. No more stressing about taking data because the R sound is counted for you to take data easily!
Work on sequencing skills and explaining how to do something with sound-loaded R YouTube videos. You don’t have to spend time searching for videos because they have been organized as QR codes in the R Articulation carryover activities set. The best thing about these how-to YouTube videos is that they are mixed group friendly!
One common core standard in classrooms is to work on comparing and contrasting. Comparing and contrasting occur when discussing characters in stories, scientific methods, and figurines in history. So, why not provide more opportunities for students to practice comparing and contrasting and practicing their r sound? Compare and contrast similar R nouns by attributes. If you don’t have time to think of word pairs, there are R flashcards in this set to help you save time.
What R Speech Therapy Activities Do You Use With Your Students?
Sometimes speech therapy for r can get a little boring for the clinician and the student. When in a planning rut, it’s nice to find activities that will liven up the sessions. So, if you have a fun r speech therapy activity, share it in the comments!
If you are trying to get more trials in your speech sound sessions but want to keep your students motivated to practice, check out this free articulation game! Nothing makes a speech therapy session drag more than when students complain that they must practice their sounds repeatedly. It can’t be just me that has had this happen in their speech room.
You will learn how to use this game to get 100 trials and have kids asking to play it again next session!
Finding activities and games that keep your kids motivated to practice over and over again can be tricky when you have a heavy articulation and phonology caseload.
And nothing is more tiring and boring than saying, “Say your _____ sound ten more times?” for the entire session. After the third speech sound group, I needed something fresh to keep ME engaged with the activity.
Articulation and phonology flashcards can only go so far, so when you switch things up with a no-prep speech therapy game, you are WINNING. Am I right, or am I right?
The game is called Race to 100. You first use a die to see which person can get all one hundred squares covered. When the student rolls the dice, they get to color or check off the number of spaces on their articulation game mat.
Before they cross their squares, that’s the number of times they have to practice their speech word. You can use a twenty-sided die to ensure you get to 100 within the session.
What is great about this game is you can use it with ANY goal, so it is mixed group friendly.
Click the button below to grab your free articulation game! The best way to use them is by printing and putting them in a plastic sheet protector or laminate. Pair it with your favorite dye and dry-erase marker, and you are good to go!
Articulation Materials that Pair Well With the Game
The beauty of this game is that you can use any flashcards or pictures you have on hand! If you need some high-trial articulation materials to use with the game, check out these resources:
What Speech Sound Games Do You Love to Use in Therapy?
Do you use some favorite low-prep games for articulation and phonology therapy often? Share in the comments, so other SLPs have more fun articulation games to use in treatment. One of my FAVE games to use towards the end of the school year is my articulation game for describing words. It’s a Name It type of game you can use with language describing goals.
If you have a lot of cluster reduction or s-blend goals, these games have been great for getting a high number of trials.
Having materials to use with group therapy can be tricky at times. If you are able to pair articulation and phonology students together, it can be hard to plan group lessons when all the students are working on a different sound, need a slightly different approach to therapy or are varying levels of skill mastery.
Let’s not even go down the mixed group situation when every student has a completely different target area lol.
These are the problems I face as a school based SLP. Then, on top of trying to increase repetitions, I also have to make time for data collection. It can be overwhelming especially if you’re caseload is growing past 55.
Articulation Flipbooks Help You Lesson Plan Easily
I created interactive articulation flipbooks to have something I could consistently pull out for students to work on during the session. I felt much more confident as an SLP knowing that my students were focused on their goals even if I was working with another student. Students became familiar with the routine of the session because I used the flipbooks as a warm up or closing activity to the session.
3 Ways To Use Articulation Flipbooks In Speech
Use the word lists in the books as an auditory bombardment listening warm up for your students with phonological processes. Have student turn on their listening ears and listen to you model words with target sound. You can also have students identify if you produced the sound correctly (auditory discrim). Use the word lists as a guide, so you don’t have to rack your brain thinking of target words.
When you need to progress monitor students or do a data probe, use these articulation flipbooks as an independent work station. When I did this with my kindergarten students, it was amazing to see them quiet and engaged in working on their sound. The kids seriously love using dry erase markers. In the picture above, I put dots for the productions that were correct for easy data collection.
I use the phrases and picture scenes to work on generalizing the student’s articulation skills beyond the word level. If I have a mixed group, I will also use my flip books to work on building MLU and use the stimulus pictures to target vocabulary and grammar goals.
Lastly, these flipbooks can be loaned out to families and teachers to have available for students to practice in the classroom or home setting. This provides a clear and structured way your students can get daily practice in with his/her sound. Plus, the teacher will like that the activities have spelling incorporated in the book.
Want to Try Out Articulation Flipbooks With Your Students?
If you are new to interactive articulation flipbooks, try out my L Flipbook for FREE. You will see an increase in getting higher production repetitions in a shorter amount of time.
And, I don’t know what it is about using dry erase markers, but adding that privilege of using them truly makes the kids more engaged with practicing. I am currently in love with Ultra Fine Dry Erase markers (amazon affiliate) for my articulation flipbooks.
How have you been utilizing my interactive articulation flip books in your therapy rooms? I would love to see your pictures in action on instagram. Just tag me @thedabblingspeechie
Summer is just around the corner and it is a great theme to use in therapy! Having summer speech therapy activities to send home as homework are perfect for those summer months. If you are working this summer, then grab some summer speech therapy activities on TPT!!
I started using my summer themed resources this week and plan to use them till the end of May. Check out my round up of free and paid TPT products that I have found to help plan therapy. I have links categorized by target area, so you can easily find the items you need!
Summer Speech Therapy Activities
Planning speech therapy lessons is a whole a lot easier when you pick a theme! If I want to do a BBQ theme, then I try to find resources that will cover goals for my whole caseload. These summer speech therapy activities are listed by target area, so you can quickly find items in the areas you need for your summer theme.
Do you have summer speech therapy activities that you love to use with your students? Leave a comment below or email me at feliceclark@thedabblingspeechie.com, so I can add them to my stash!
Spring is here for many folks, so it’s time to start grabbing some spring resources for speech therapy! I love spring time because the weather is nice and the sunshine is out! Plus, planning therapy is super easy with a spring theme. When I am planning for speech therapy, I look at my caseload’s target areas of need. Then, I pick some themes that I want to use to target their goals. It makes searching for themed therapy items a lot easier when I know what I am specifically looking for on social media. To help all my SLP’s out, I categorized tons of spring resources for speech therapy by target area, so it is easy to find activities that will meet your student’s needs.
Let’s get a head start on planning therapy before the wave of assessments and IEP’s overtakes our therapy planning time! Here’s my list of great FREE & PAID spring resources for speech therapy!
I am super excited about my newest series of Interactive Articulation Flipbooks! At my elementary charter site, I have a lot of articulation goals, so these are going to help my kiddos stay engaged and work on their goals! My students LOVE using dry erase markers, especially my middle school students. It got me thinking about how to incorporate dry erase markers more in my lessons and that’s how my Interactive Flip Books were created! Print the pages on card stock and laminate for durability. Use a dry erase marker to let kids write on the pages in the flipbook and the erase to use again and again.
I plan on making articulation flipbooks for all the sounds, but started with the ones I needed the most for my caseload! Psst…f,v,sh,ch are coming up next! When I arrived at my elementary charter site this year, there were NO materials. That’s right, NOT-TA! So, I want to make a comprehensive set in the event that I will need more sounds in the future. Ideas for Language Flipbooks have been swirling around in my head and I will one day get to actually creating them. Until then, I want to share the latest round of books with you!
My /S,L,R/ BLENDS interactive articulation flipbooks include word lists, word lists with pictures, fill in the blank words, fill in the blank phrases and picture scenes to target those sounds at the multiple sentence level.
I have 2nd-4th grade that are working on /r/ and are able to read, so I made a set that is for your reader group. Hoping to add the vocalic /r/’s soon! There are word lists, fill in phrases, sentences and stories. This is great for those that do “quick artic”. Snag that set HERE!
My /K,G/ interactive books are filled with word lists, word lists with pictures, fill in the blank words, phrases and picture scenes. I have 3 little ones on my caseload that are going to love using these and will get in lots of repetitions in the process.
I have been hanging some of my frequently used books on my whiteboard with these cool metal hooks from amazon. Best product ever!! I put them on my file cabinet too, so I can hang task cards and my flipbooks!
Check out my youtube video to see it in action!
Since creating this post, I have added more Interactive Flipbooks because my students are loving them.
I am hoping to finish up all the sounds and then I am moving on to some fun language flipbooks!! What do you think?
. Best product ever!! I put them on my file cabinet too, so I can hang task cards and my 