Are you wondering how to create beach theme speech therapy sessions?

I’m a big fan of themes! I think it makes therapy so fun and cohesive! Plus it’s great for teaching new vocabulary words in a context rich environment! So let’s dive into how to create beach therapy speech sessions!

1. Pick beach theme speech therapy books for literacy based therapy

Literacy based therapy is evidence based and perfect for mixed groups. With practice, it’s easy to figure out how you’re going to target your students’ various language goals such as syntax, grammar, vocabulary, etc. A great way to begin with literacy based therapy is to work on skills like WH questions (while reading or at the end), story grammar, and story retell.

You want to make sure that the book you select is ideal for YOUR caseload. For example, I have students with articulation/phonology, language, fluency, and social skills goals. I deliberately selected books for my kids that included social skill themes. Consider your caseload and pick the books that are best for you!

The books I chose –

• The Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister
• The Pout-Pout Fish by Deborah Diesen

(also Never Feed a Shark by Greening Rosie but I used that exclusively for artic/ssd therapy)

Whitney from Let’s Talk with Whitney SLP has a wonderful list of ocean books for speech therapy if you want some more ideas!

2. Prep for Articulation Crafts and Activities

Themed therapy is super easy with articulation / speech sound disorder therapy! You get to use your go-to materials (cards, visuals, etc.) and just pair it with a reinforcing activity. Most of my kids are using the cycles approach to work on eliminating various phonological processes/patterns. So I typically grab my phonology toolkit cards, Bjorem speech sound cue cards, and an activity that can get me lots of repetitions! Always aiming for 100+!

That’s why the activity needs to be fun and engaging, but I can’t let it dominate the entire session. Here’s what I chose –

JellyFish Craft

All you need is paper plates, scissors, streamers, glue, and markers!

I re-used streamers from a birthday party (hence why they’re only red/yellow) and paper plates from my pantry. The rest I had in my craft tub at school. Always ballin’ on a budget!

Gone Fishin Game

There are lots of variations of this game under different names. But it’s fun/quick and great for a reinforcement activity they can work for!

Never Feed a Fish Shark by Greening Rosie

I picked this book up for a few bucks at Wal-Mart and my kids loved feeding their artic cards into its mouth!

Other Beach Theme Speech Therapy Ideas

There are so many crafts out there (looking at you, Pinterest) that go with a beach theme. I just picked the one that seemed the easiest for me! Shark Bite is a great game as well if you have it!

I really wanted to make an ocean themed sensory bin happen but I just ran out of time. Search Pinterest for some truly creative ideas!

3. Use Easy Multi-Use Language Worksheets

Having such a variety of language goals on your caseload is hard. It is difficult to tackle everyone’s goals without using a million materials. That’s why I created these ocean theme language worksheets that target literally every language goal I could think of for a K-5th population! Including basic concepts, grammar, sequencing, predicting, main idea, all the components of the language processing hierarchy – and more!

I printed them off ONCE then used them over and over again in sleeves with dry erase markers! My kids find dry erase markers so much more motivating than pencil/paper tasks!

and there you have it – beach theme speech therapy ideas!

What else would you add? Have you done an ocean theme before in your speech sessions?

-Chloe B | School SLP

Looking for more speech therapy ideas? Check out this blog post on 8 Ways to Incorporate Lego Blocks into Speech Therapy