How to Use Short Stories for Speech Therapy

Short stories for speech therapy can be an incredibly versatile tool. Let me show you all the ways they can make your life easier by saving you time in planning and prep!

Short Stories in Therapy

You need short stories for your speech therapy sessions for a variety of reasons. In therapy, we are often scaffolding for the children we work with and moving along a support continuum from more to less. Short stories like these allow for children to work on listening comprehension AND reading comprehension. The differentiated activities provide the opportunity to decrease support as needed when answering comprehension questions, sequencing & retelling the story, and vocabulary building. This makes them the perfect therapy activity!

When you work with mixed groups, you often have children working on many different goals. This can pose a problem when planning and implementing interventions to best meet each child’s needs. Luckily, these short stories make it very easy:

• Articulation practice? Choose a story that has the target sound included and have that child read aloud or practice the words and write them down.
• One student with goals for reading comprehension while another is working on listening comprehension? One can read while the other listens
• Grammar goals? Use the sequencing and retelling activities to work on microstructure or answering questions to produce a complete sentence

You can give them all the same pages or individualize using the same story… everyone gets what they need!

Short stories for Informal Assessments

Often when we are gathering information about a child, we look to informal assessments. These can provide valuable information that formalized assessments do not. This resource is a great way to gather information about how a student might perform in the context of a classroom activity. It can tell you the level of support they might need for comprehension and vocabulary instruction. It also provides important details about their current narrative language skills.

Short Stories for Progress Monitoring

Progress monitoring is an important part of the therapy process! These stories provide a consistent format, making them easy to use all year. You can present different stories to measure growth for listening comprehension, reading comprehension, vocabulary, sequencing, and story retelling. Because of the different levels included for each skill, as the children you work with improve their skills, the resource grows with them! Additionally, the story retelling tasks can be recorded and used to analyze the progress of articulation, syntax, and semantic goals. All of this makes it very easy to write up those progress reports every quarter!

Short stories for Carryover

Carryover is an important aspect of speech therapy and you can utilize these to send as homework. Parents can complete with the child or review a completed one. Another idea would be to give them to teachers as a classroom carryover activity.

Stories Paired with Functional Activity

Many of the topics in these short stories are ones that students may have a connection to. This makes it perfect to use with similar activities in the therapy room. Here are some examples:

• One story is about painting a picture, so you can discuss the process. First, you can discuss materials you need and what you will paint. Then, complete the painting and share. This for executive functioning skills!
• For a story about washing the dog, you can use pretend play! Grab a stuffed dog and bin, then pretend to wash him. You can discuss what you are doing and why to target expressive language.

Now that you know you need Short Stories for Speech Therapy, check these out:

• Short stories Set 1 includes stories about wrapping a gift for mom, making hot chocolate, getting a new pet fish, eating ice cream, and planting a garden.
• Short Stories Set 2 includes stories about writing a letter, washing the dog, making hamburgers, having a picnic, and painting a picture.
• Seasonal Stories for the Year includes stories about making pie, raking leaves, caramel apples, snow cream, snow day, making a snowman, planting flowers, rainy day, flying a kite, camping, fishing, making a sandcastle
• Animal Fiction includes stories about dog detective, elephant’s peanut shop, cat’s fishing trip, mouse’s cheese hunt, and cow’s milkshakes

OR grab the bundle of Set 1-3 and save 20%!

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