It’s officially December, which means that it’s almost Christmas! All of my students’ families celebrate Christmas, which is why I’m able to have Christmas themed sessions for my entire caseload! **insert happy dance here*

I LOVE all things Christmas! It is such an exciting and joyful time with Christmas music, lights, cookies, movies, and decorations! There are so many elements to a proper celebration. And from an SLP perspective, that means there are lots of Christmas themed vocabulary for our kids to learn!

Materials that are themed around something that the kids are familiar with and enjoy = better engagement in my sessions!

Planning themed activities for tele-therapy sessions can be difficult. How do you keep things fun and Christmas-y? Here are some of my ideas – I hope it’s helpful!

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5 Ideas for Christmas Themed Speech Tele-Therapy

1. Play Christmas Matching Games on Boom Learning

My kids and I love using Boom cards from the Boom Learning website in our tele-therapy sessions. They’re engaging and interactive (kids love) + they’re designed by SLPs to target speech goals (I love).

You can even play games with Boom cards! I created four Christmas themed decks that are all matching games! They target –

• Basic Concepts (Spatial, Qualitative & Emotions)
• Synonyms and Antonyms
• Articulation: k, g, t, d, f, v, sh, ch
• Articulation: s, z, th, l, r, and blends

2. Use a Green Screen (Behind You)

Don’t want to spend money decorating for each themed unit? Buy a green screen!

If you’re unfamiliar with a green screen, it’s literally green colored cloth that you hang directly behind you when you’re on the computer’s camera. Just like in the movies, the green background is able to be replaced with special effects to make it look like you’re somewhere else entirely!

There are some cheap ones on Amazon!

Once you’ve got it set up, you can use it all year long! You can make it look like you’re at the North Pole for Christmas, in Ireland for Saint Patrick’s Day, on a farm, in space – the possibilities are endless!

Depending on the platform that you’re using for your tele-therapy sessions, you can upload a virtual background image to replace your green screen on camera. Just Google what kind of Christmas background you want!

3. Use Christmas Themed Online Games as Reinforcers

Your clients will love the ‘brain break’ to play and it reinforcers their continued hard work. However, if you’re teaching Christmas vocabulary or using them as target words for articulation therapy, then the games themselves will allow for even more targeted reinforcement opportunities!

This website may be helpful if you’re looking for free online Christmas games.

4. Do a Christmas Activity Together

You may not be able to ice skate together on screen, but you can make hot chocolate, bake cookies, or decorate a gingerbread house! You can send items home to parents to do the activity at the same time, or you can be doing the activity and let the child participate by working on their goals!

For example, a client working on prepositions could tell you where exactly to place the different candies around the gingerbread house.

A child working on sequencing could give you the steps to make hot chocolate. A student working on retell could retell all the steps it took to bake cookies.

It will feel similar to the YouTube influencers that the kids watch, but this time it will be interactive and promoting their speech-language development!

5. Read Christmas Books Together

Literacy based speech therapy is so powerful! And there are so many awesome Christmas themed books out there to read!

Make sure that the book can truly be used to target all of the goals you want to work on. Bonus points if you can use one book for your entire caseload!

Sometimes kids are not as engaged with books over Zoom as they are in person. That’s why I love Vooks and use it all the time!

Animated storybooks are way more interesting than the flat images in a regular book! I also love how the words on the page are highlighted as they are read aloud to really emphasize each word. Vooks has got several new releases for the Christmas season including a book about Rudolph, Arctic Christmas, and The Mitten. (Click here to get a free trial!)

I hope these ideas sound like fun to you and your kids! I plan to use them in my upcoming Christmas themed tele-therapy sessions!

Do you plan to try any of these? What other ideas can you think of? Let me know in the comments below!

– Emily B | School SLP