Free Speech Therapy Activities
Speech therapy is an interesting subject because there are many different activities that professionals can do to help students achieve. However, even if you are not a professional speech therapist, there are several free activities that you can do with students who have speech problems.
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Identification
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As a regular classroom teacher, speak individually to each of your students and listen carefully to their speech patterns. You will be able to identify students who have speech problems, whether or not they are in speech therapy. Some problems, like mispronunciation of letters and sounds, will take a lot of professional therapy activities to correct. However, there are some speech problems, like speaking too softly or showing a hesitancy to speak out loud, that a regular classroom teacher can easily help students overcome. Identify a few key students that need a little extra help, and then develop classroom activities based on these needs.
Conversation Partners
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Create conversation partners. Pair students together with others that they get along with and feel comfortable with. All students can participate. Give the class a period of five minutes to discuss a topic. At the end of the time, have the groups choose one member to tell the class what they discussed. This way, students can simply talk to a friend or a classmate, and one of them can give a report. Getting students talking is a great way to begin to work on speech problems.
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Phone Calls
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Many students who are nervous to speak in front of a class or have trouble speaking directly to a teacher might simply have problems with nervousness, and might not have speech problems at all. To help identify these students, place a call to the students you feel might have problems. Speak to each student over the phone for a few moments. Ask them how they feel the class is doing, and what they are looking forward to in school. A few moments might be enough to enlighten you about how a student is doing.
Let Students Choose Subjects
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When you have students who refuse to speak to the entire class, a push in the right direction might be all that they need. Instead of assigning speech topics, let students choose their own. As a student chooses his own topic, and gets excited about it, you might find that worries about speaking out loud will fade away.
Repeating
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Play a repetition game with the entire class. There are easy games to start with, such as beginning with "Mary went to the store and bought apples." The second student will need to repeat what you have said, and then add "and" followed by something to buy that starts with "B." The goal of the game is to see how many items can be remembered and repeated. Students will get wrapped up in the game and won't even notice that they are practicing the sounds in the entire alphabet.
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