5 Tips For Using Speech Therapy Picture Scenes To Increase Language
If you are like me, you are a busy speech/language pathologist or special education teacher! I mean…BUSY! When I prep activities for therapy, it is always a bonus if there are multiple ways to use it. What I mean by that, is “can I use this with multiple students to target their IEP goals?” and “can I use it more than once so I don’t have to spend my time prepping multiple sets of materials?”. I feel your pain when it comes to the time crunch we all face! I needed printable picture scenes for speech therapy that were simple enough to use with toddlers and preschoolers, but that I could also use for a variety of language skills.
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| Autism Little Learners | Speech Therapy Picture Scenes |
1. COLORING PAGES
Have you ever tried using coloring sheets with picture scenes? Coloring sheets with speech therapy pictures scenes offer endless opportunities to change up the instructions and target a variety of academic and language goals and objectives! You can use a color page for simple directions “color an owl” or to increase the complexity of the direction, “color the owl that has earmuffs on the color green”. This is also a great option to send home to parents for some fun carryover practice at home.
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| Use speech therapy picture scenes for coloring |
2. MINIATURE TOYSThis is my favorite! I love the idea of using miniature toys to make these picture scenes for speech therapy more hands-on and super fun for preschoolers. First of all, kids LOVE miniature toys. Using them during therapy can help with motivation and definitely increase the fun factor! Plus, there are endless opportunities for options to come up with new directions. For example, “put the snowman next to an owl” or “put the polar bear on top of the raccoon”. With other students, you might increase the difficulty by using two-step directions “before you put the snowman next to the bunny, put the horse under the owl”. See?! Endless opportunities!
 Using miniature toys to turn up the FUN with picture scenes 3. USE LEGOS OR OTHER FAVORITE TOYSMuch like the tips for using miniature toys, using favorite toys of individual students can up the motivation by 1000%! If your student loves Legos, use those! If they have a special interest in Paw Patrol or Peppa Pig, use those characters with the speech therapy picture scenes! You will have your little students ready to participate and so engaged.
 Using favorite toys always help increase motivation 4. DRY ERASE MARKERSAnother way to switch things up is to use dry erase markers to follow directions with the speech therapy picture scenes. You can ask your students to “circle” or “put an X” on certain parts of the scene. You can ask them to make different shapes or use different colors to add more to the direction. For example, “put an X on the yellow bird”, “put a triangle around the pink bird” or increase the difficulty with directions like “use the blue marker to circle the boy who is throwing”. Bonus: children LOVE erasing the marks that they make!
 Dry erase markers can give you endless options with the speech therapy picture scenes 5. COLLECTING A LANGUAGE SAMPLEIf you are in a pinch, these picture scenes can be a great way to elicit language for a language sample. Right now, I am doing speech therapy online due to COVID-19 and one of the hardest things has been obtaining a good language sample for me to analyze! I started using these speech therapy picture scenes on Seesaw, with specific directions for parents to guide them on how to ask open-ended questions, and BOOM, I received some awesome language samples to evaluate! It was so awesome to have the samples as an audio file so I could pause and go back to listen to speech sounds and other specific language skills. Below you will see a picture of the directions I gave to parents that worked really well for me!
 Use the speech therapy pictures scenes to collect an amazing language sample! I hope these tips help you find fun and new ways to use picture scenes for speech therapy and reduce your prep time!
Would love to hear your comments below! Is this helpful? What else would you like to see from me? Thank you for everything you do & for being a part of the Autism Little Learners Community!
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