Guest Post: How to Jazz up your Speech Therapy Sessions on a Shoestring Budget

Hello Smart Speech Therapy readers!  My name is Lindsey and I started a blog called Word Nerd SpeechTeach in December 2012. I love creating products and sharing the activities that I do with my kids in speech therapy. Today, I am bringing you a blog post about great dollar store finds to jazz up your therapy sessions!

I love the dollar store when it comes to therapy activities. I can’t leave the store without some awesome finds to incorporate into therapy sessions. Recently, I stopped at my local dollar store and (surprise, surprise) found some great items to spruce up my therapy sessions!!

Tools of the Trade

I always find myself giving my students “tips” to help them with something that they are working on. Typically, I have post-its
attached to their goal page(s) and pull them out when we are working on a specific concept, but these little tools are way more fun! I
whipped up a few tool cards for my students working on their /r/ sound and wa-la – easy, simple, and fun way to target their “tips”! “Work on your hammer” just sounds so much more fun than saying “pull your
tongue up”!!

Holiday Game Lights

I have a love/hate relationship with flashcards. While on one hand, I find them very useful, I also DESPISE drilling with them. This is an
easy way to jazz up boring old flashcard activities! This week is St. Patty’s week in my therapy room, so I cut out some shamrocks and taped them to “tap lights”. (I don’t really know what these lights are really called, so “tap lights” it is!) The first student to turn on
their tap light gets to say their word and gets some sort of a reinforcer. This week, it was M&Ms because they are the color of the
rainbow!

A Little Bit of Applause, Please?

I am always trying to find new ways for my students to self monitor. I saw this “clapper hand” in the store and knew just what I wanted to do with it. As students are transitioning to sentences/reading/conversation, they get to use the “clapper hand”. As they are speaking, if they say a word incorrectly, they shake the hand once and repeat the word correctly. If they say their whole
sentence/read a whole paragraph/participate in a conversation correctly, then they shake the hand a few times to give themselves
some applause. Hey, who doesn’t like to toot their own horn every once in awhile?!

Vocabulary Dice

A while ago, I purchased a material called “Context Clues” by Nicole Allison. You can check out her blog post about this product here.
We are using these cards to target context clues, definitions, and are creating our own sentences with the word. Because we review the
same vocabulary words often, I wanted to change things up a bit. I wrote the vocabulary words that we are working on onto dice and presto – a great product paired up with an interactive activity! I may even challenge my students to put two words into the same sentence, but we’re a ways off from that right now!

I hope that you found these ideas helpful and maybe they have even inspired you to make a dollar store run of your own! Please feel free to also ‘like’ my facebook pagefor freebies and flash sales! If you are looking for new materials to use in your therapy room (along with a lot of freebies), please check out my TpTstore! What inexpensive ideas have you found to add to your therapy room?