Valentine’s Day is such a fun holiday and makes for a perfect theme for your speech therapy sessions in February! It can be difficult to come up with ideas for your sessions with everything else on your plate, so let me help you out! Here are 5 Valentine’s Day activities for speech therapy!
P.S. Let me know in the comments below if you use any of these ideas or have your own to contribute! I love to chat so you can also DM me on social media whenever!
Valentine’s Day Activities
1. Read a Book (Literacy Based Therapy)
If you know me, then you know I love incorporating books into my sessions whenever I can! It’s a great way to target a wide variety of goals and your administrators/gen-ed teachers will love that you are incorporating literacy!
A lot of my students don’t get a lot of book exposure. They may have difficulty reading, so they are often still working on decoding skills rather than reading fluently on their own to target skills like comprehension. That’s why it’s great to read the story TO them! It frees up their brain to absorb grammar, syntax, vocabulary, narrative elements, etc.!
My favorite Valentine’s Day books are Monster Love by Rachel Bright and Pete the Cat: Valentine’s Day is Cool as my kids love Pete! You can probably find these books at your local library, or you can access the read alouds on YouTube for free. (Here are the links to Monster Love and Pete the Cat: Valentine’s Day is Cool read alouds.)
I also use these books with my book companions and craft activities to take up an entire language session! They’re only $1 and so easy to use with your students! Just print and go! Here’s a link to it in my TPT store!
2. Make a Craft
Crafts for Valentine’s Day can be as simple as writing a grammatically correct note or V-Day card to someone like I have in this product, or just simply grabbing construction paper and letting students have at it!
If you just need to work on skills like sequencing, following directions, etc. then you could do any craft such as decorating mail boxes or paper bags to collect cards!
Students with articulation goals could just grab some dab markers and get 100 trials on their speech sounds by simply completing a 100 chart! Check out this freebie in my store if that’s something you might need for your caseload!
3. Play a Game
One of my favorite games to play is HedBanz because it works on descriptive language skills. I bring out my Expanding Expression Tool visuals to do semantic feature analysis and kids don’t even realize how hard they are working because it’s such a fun game! You can easily make this work with a Valentine’s Day spin! Or you can play Candyland! It’s a classic, but the candy element fits into a great Valentine’s Day theme!
4. Themed Stimuli
Every goal can be made to fit the theme if you just give the stimuli a little Valentine’s Day twist!
Here are some examples:
Articulation Goals – pick words that have to do with the theme (Working on pre-vocalic /R/? Target red, roses, write, ribbon, read, etc.)
Fluency Goals – Let students practice their fluency strategies by discussing how they are planning to celebrate Valentine’s Day or discuss any feelings/stuttering that may arise with wanting to talk to someone they like on Valentine’s Day.
Social Skills – Ooh this is a great one for kids working on social skills because what would they write in a Valentine’s Day note? How would they go about talking to different people on this particular holiday? So much to work with there!
Language Goals / AAC Goals – You can probably find something on TPT that’s V-Day themed for whatever goal your student is working on. (Can’t find something? Message me or comment below!)
In fact, I have the following higher language skills activities in my store –
5. Have Students Write a Letter to Someone They Care About
This can be to a parent, friend, family member, or teacher – whoever! The student gets to practice their writing skills, specifically in the form of a letter, and you get to check on their goals as a result! Grammar, vocabulary, syntax, etc. can be easily targeted, and any goals that need to be verbal can be incorporated into the brainstorm time at the beginning of the activity.
You can work on descriptive language skills by having the student describe the person using semantic feature analysis / EET, you can have students working on articulation goals come up with words that start with their target sound to include in their letter that they can then read aloud. The possibilities are endless with Valentine’s Day activities! This letter writing activity is also a great way to promote kindness and thankfulness!
There are your 5 Valentine’s Day Activities Ideas!
I hope these ideas were helpful to you as you plan your Valentine’s Day themed therapy sessions! Valentine’s Day activities can be a lot of fun if you let them be! Hope you enjoy! xoxo
-Chloe B | School SLP
Looking for more V-Day ideas? Check out this blog post!
