You have almost made it to summer break! Before you pack your bags and take a much-needed break, you may be wondering how to ensure your students can still practice the skills they’ve learned over summer break. No need to worry because there are plenty of easy ways to help set your students and their families up to practice their skills!
Calendars:
One way to help students practice their speech and language skills is to provide calendars that have activities targeting their speech and language skills for the summer months. For each day on the calendar, put an easy activity that the student could do. TeachersPayTeachers has plenty of free summer calendars addressing articulation, language, and fluency that you can provide to parents. You can easily send this home with their progress reports so the students and their families can see what goals they are working on, and how they can work on those skills at home.
Websites/Apps:
Do you use any apps or websites that the students can access at home? Many of my students love playing games on the tablet or on their computers, so why not give them resources for online games! A few of my favorite websites and apps are:
Books:
For speech sound production, there are several websites (including speechsprouts.com and speechmusings.com) that provide lists of speech-loaded books categorized by sound. Encourage your students to find words that have their target sounds. Additionally, most libraries host summer reading challenges that encourage children of all ages to read books and earn prizes! Along with the reading challenge, you can provide parents with tips on how to use books to improve their child’s vocabulary skills, language comprehension skills, sequencing skills, grammar, and more!
For students who may not have access to books or the library, I have listed a few of my favorite websites that allows them access to books:
Also, check with your local library to see if they offer access to free e-books!
Voicemails:
If you know you will be returning to the same school next school year, you can provide your students with your school phone number and extension and ask them to leave you a voicemail using their best speech and language skills! You can tell them to describe what they’ve done so far this summer or have them tell you about how they’ve been using their best speech and language skills over summer. My students get very excited when I tell them that I listened to their voicemail and we discuss what they talked about in the message.
As we near the end of the school year, it’s great to take a second to look back and see the progress our students have made. While we want to ensure they maintain the skills they’ve learned during the school year, it’s often difficult and time-consuming to create speech and language-rich activities for them to do over the summer. I hope that these ideas inspire you to encourage your students to use the skills they’ve learned without the added stress of creating new activities for the summer months.
Author: Schyler Fujimoto, M.S., CCC-SLP