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I am a huge proponent of using music with preschoolers during speech therapy. I run weekly circle time speech groups in my preschool classrooms and I have seen how music can increase engagement and help children with many different speech and language skills. Some of the goals that I work on through music are verbal imitation, gross motor imitation, following directions, prepositions, body parts, vocabulary, and more! Here are my top 10 songs for preschool speech therapy with links whenever possible!

1. Clap Your Hands by Wee Sing: My absolute top pick for getting gross motor imitation and shared attention, also great for working on the concept of fast and slow
2. What are You Wearing? by Hap Palmer: I use this song as my “circle opener” every week to cue my students in that speech circle time is starting. It is a grew song for learning clothing vocabulary and working on gross motor imitation as well as “what” questions.
3. One Little Finger by Super Simple Songs: All the Super Simple Songs music is fantastic for language skills but this particular song is one of my favorites. It is great for learning body parts, following directions, and learning to point. The youtube video is great too and has helped some of my students learn to isolate their pointer finger.
4. Can An Elephant Jump? by ELF Learning: This super fun song is great for lots of goals! Learning action words, yes/no questions, gross motor imitation and more! Kids think it is super funny and I never get sick of it!
5. Octopus by Charlotte Diamond: Cute song is great for gross motor imitation, verbal imitation (kids can’t resist saying Chomp! Chomp! Chomp!), and gestures (I always do a big “Oh no!” with my hands on my cheeks)
6. Animal Boogie by Barefoot Books: This is actually a book with accompanying CD but it’s something I always keep in my circle time bag. It gets requested frequently by my students and it is great for working on action words, gross motor imitation, and commenting (I always ask student’s what animal they liked best while we look at the last page that shows all the animals.
7. We All Go Traveling By by Barefoot Books: Another book with CD by Barefoot Books! This is definitely my most requested book/song by my preschoolers. I love it because I pair a gross motor action with each of the vehicles (stomping for the rumbly truck, etc) and it gets lots of gross motor and verbal imitation from my students. It also grabs the attention of many kids who are tough to engage!
8. The Body Rock by Greg and Steve: There are several good songs on the Kids in Motion CD by Greg and Steve (Freeze Dance is another favorite) but The Body Rock gets the most play with my kids. It is great for learning body parts and getting gross motor imitation.
9. Spider on the Floor by Raffi: Pair this song with some cheap dollar store spiders and you have a winner for teaching body parts and following directions.
10. Puppy, Puppy, Puppy by Kids Express Train: My favorite song on the Imitation Station CD. I have a cheap set of puppies from Oriental Trading Company that I use with this song. It is great for action words, following directions, and getting kids to imitate “woof”!

I hope you find this list helpful for adding in some great songs for working on preschool speech and language skills!

Funny Directions by Speecharoo is one of my very favorite iPad apps to use with preschoolers and early elementary age students! It is fantastic to use to work on following 1/2/3 step directions, but it also great for eliciting language and comments. The funny animations in the app really draw out language (and laughs!) from my kids!

It’s super simple to jump in and start using the app. From the home screen you can see above, you tap a balloon to choose which setting you want (beach, classroom, park, or bedroom) and what level of directions you want (1, 2, or 3 step).

In the picture above, I have chosen the beach scene and 2 step directions. The app reads the direction and then the child moves the pieces to follow the direction. When the direction is completed correctly, a cute animation and super funny audio is played. This is what makes the app really fantastic! It is very engaging for kids keeps them wanting to listen closely and get the direction correct so they get the reward of the silly animation.

Each scene has 10 directions so it is very easy to take data. The app keeps track for you as well! One minor complaint is that you can’t switch back and forth between different players who may be working on different levels of following directions. The app is so engaging for the kids though, my students loved watching other play and were super excited when it was their turn.

The app is terrific for following directions, auditory memory, and prepositions. I also use it with my students with autism to elicit comments and conversation. It is also great as a reinforcement activity because kids love to play it! It is available in the iTunes store for $2.99 which I think is a steal for such a fun and useful app.

Disclaimer: I was provided a free copy of this app for review and no further compensation. All opinions expressed are my own.

I have always found monitoring progress and writing goals for preschoolers with language delays a tricky proposition. How do I get good baseline data with these squirmy little ones? How do I show progress? How do I pick and prioritize goals in children who may be behind in a wide variety of language areas? After struggling with those questions each year especially at progress report time, I decided to come up with a tool to make screening, progress monitoring, and writing goals for my preschoolers easier! The result of that is the Preschool Language – Screening, Progress Monitoring, and Goal Setting Kit.

The kit is designed to easily gather information about the language skills of preschool age children or older children with language delays. This information is extremely useful in establishing baseline skills, monitoring progress, and determining areas that may need to be targeted for intervention.

Using the screening pages and stimuli pictures, 26 common language skills that are frequently addressed by speech-language pathologists who work with preschool children can be screened.

The screening sheets are very clearly organized and simple to record on. You can also easily pick and choose areas to screen if you only have certain areas of concern. You can see the first page of the screening sheets below.

After you have recorded a child’s performance on the screening sheets, you can quickly transfer that information onto the Screening Summary Form and the Progress Monitoring Form. There is also a preschool language skills goal bank that corresponds to all the language areas screened so you can instantly convert the information you gathered to IEP goals for your preschool students!

Using the screening kit to quickly gather baseline and progress data saves so much time when I am drowning in a large caseload or scrambling to get progress reports done! I am thrilled with how well it has been received by the SLP community and the amazing feedback the kit gets!

On Teachers Pay Teachers the kit has over 550 4.0 star ratings! Here is some of the feedback:

“I can’t believe I’m just now coming across this AMAZING kit! I needed something quick to reassess one of my preschool students and found this! You have saved me so much time. I love that you included IEP goals to go along with it. Thank you so much!”

“This is an awesome product! It is such a life saver and has been so helpful during the crazy busy IEP season. I use it every week! Thank you for putting in so much time and effort and creating such a great product.”

“I can’t say enough good things about this product! The screening has saved me so much time and effort. I work with 40 preschoolers this year and I can pull this out and be ready to screen in a minute’s notice. Love the goals in the kit also.”

To get the Preschool Language – Screening, Monitoring, and Goal Setting Kit click here!

March really snuck up on me but luckily I have a great stash of spring-themed activities to use with my preschoolers! I do both a whole group language lesson (circle time) and small group centers language lessons with my preschoolers with autism. Here are my lesson plans for 4 weeks of spring-themed preschool group speech activities! They include books and activities from my TPT store, commercially available books, and FREEBIES!

Week 1:

Circle Time Preschool Group Speech

Interactive Book: Butterfly, Butterfly What Do You See? Interactive Book – interactive book in the style of “Brown Bear, Brown Bear” – targets spring vocabulary, picture matching, answering questions

Song: Eensy Weensy Spider from Super Simple Learning

Small Group Centers

Interactive Cut and Glue Book: Butterfly, Butterfly What Do You See? Interactive Book : students create their own black and white version of the book we read during circle time

Interactive Sentence Flips Bugs and Birds: interactive activity for practicing prepositions (in, on, and under), answering “where” questions, and sentence expansion

Week 2:

Circle Time Preschool Group Speech

Interactive Book: What’s in Bunny’s Basket Interactive Book – interactive book that targets answering “what” questions related to spring vocabulary and simple inferencing

Commenting Board: What is your favorite spring thing? (included in the What’s in Bunny’s Basket Interactive Book pack) – practices answering questions, asking questions, and making comments

Song: Eensy Weensy Spider from Super Simple Learning

Small Group Centers

Interactive Cut and Glue Book: What’s in Bunny’s Basket Cut and Glue Book (black and white version of the book we read during circle time

Free Spring Categories Cut Color and Glue Pages: freebie for sorting items into categories!

Week 3

Circle Time Preschool Group Speech

Interactive Book: Freebie! Bunny Needs a Bath Interactive Book – targets answering questions, labeling colors, and lengthening utterances

Commenting Board: What Color is Your Favorite? (from Communication Boards – Visuals for Commenting, Questions, and Increased Language)

Song – The Way the Bunny Hops by The Kiboomers

Small Group Centers

Interactive Sentence Flips Bugs and Birds: interactive activity for practicing prepositions (in, on, and under), answering “where” questions, and sentence expansion

FREE Spring Prepositions Cut and Glue Book: extra practice for prepositions that student’s can take home

Week 4

Circle Time Preschool Group Speech

Book – “Bear Wants More” by Karma Wilson – fun book with the repetitive line “Bear wants more” which is great for practicing imitation and eliciting “more” by signing or using AAC devices

Song – The Way the Bunny Hops by The Kiboomers

Small Group Centers

FREE Spring Sequencing Cut and Glue Worksheets – choose from 3, 4, or 5 step sequences based on the skill level of the student

Those are my spring preschool group speech therapy lesson plans! I hope you find them useful! Happy Spring!

Spring is here! Here are some great FREE speech and language activities with a spring theme!

First up, FIVE spring freebies from the Communication Window Teachers Pay Teachers shop!

Free Spring Sequencing Cut and Glue Worksheets

Free Spring Categories Cut Color and Glue:

Free Spring Prepositions Interactive Cut and Glue Book

Free Bunny Needs a Bath! Interactive Book

Spring Roll-A-Dice Freebies: Open-Ended, Synonyms, and Compare/Contrast

Here are some other great spring freebies from other TPT sellers:

Butterfly Associations: 42 cards for identified associated items

Easter Pronouns: cute picture cards for working on pronouns

Spring Showers Following Directions: following directions game for 1, 2, and 3 step directions

Spring Ordinal Numbers and Positional Words: love these cute cut and glue worksheets for following directions!

Spring Build Your Own Bingo: great for spring vocabulary, I also like to use for following directions (i.e. glue the chick under the egg)

Categories in Springtime: adorable spring categories activities, includes pictures for non-readers!

Would You Rather Spring and Easter: great for conversation starters or artic carryover!

Spring Garden Following Directions: cute coloring page for following directions

I was so excited to get to review the Sunny Articulation Phonology Test Kit App from Smarty Ears Apps because I have multiple preschoolers on my caseload with phonological disorders. Assessing them quickly and monitoring their progress is vital and this app will definitely help with that!

Getting started with the app is very easy. Simply enter in a child’s name, gender, and birth date and you are ready to go!

The Sunny Articulation Phonology Test Kit is unique in that you can choose to do a quick consonant screener, a full evaluation (you can choose whether or not to include vowels here, love that option!), or just an R screener (also love this option so I don’t have to waste a bunch of time for kids with just “r” problems!) You can see your choices in the image below.

For this review, I chose to do a full assessment. Once you click to start the assessment, you will be taken through a series of pictures. The word being tested is written phonetically at the top of the screen. The phonemes being evaluated are highlighted. If a child makes an error, you simply tap on the phoneme in error and a menu will come up where you can select the type of error made. In the picture below, you can see that the child I was testing exhibited cluster reduction on the /sn/ in “snake”. Entering substitutions/omissions/etc. is so quick and easy! I love it! Another great feature is that you can record the child’s productions which is very helpful for later reference.

The full assessment (without vowels) is 46 pictures long. A little long for my preschoolers attention span, but the iPad helped with the attention aspect! I found the pictures to all be very appropriate for even preschool age students with only a few exceptions (olive was tough!). After you complete the assessment you can also choose whether to also assess at the sentence level which is a fantastic option. You also enter in a subjective judgement of overall intelligibility rate at the single word and conversational level.

After your assessment is complete, you can then generate a very in-depth report that analyzes the child’s errors by phoneme position, manner of articulation, voicing feature, the specific word errors, place of articulation, and phonological process. It gives an incredible amount of information with no extra work from you! Awesome! You can also add your own recommendations into the report.

Another nice feature is that you can turn on or off whether you want articulation sound norms to show up in the report. My district has specific norms we use so I appreciate the option to take this out. You can see this option and the other setting you can change in the image below.

I found the app very user friendly. It provided me with a wealth of information about my articulation and phonology students. It will be a terrific resource for progress monitoring, quick screenings, and full evaluations!

The Sunny Articulation Phonology Test Kit is available in the iTunes store for $49.99.

Disclaimer: I was provided a free copy of this app for review and no further compensation. All opinions expressed are my own.

Even if you don’t celebrate St. Patrick’s Day it is a fun theme to use in speech therapy! Here is a list of fantastic FREE speech and language activities to help with your planning!

First up, a freebie from the Communication Window TPT store!

Spring Roll a Dice Freebies – Open Ended, Synonyms, and Compare/Contrast

Here are some other freebies I have found:

Pot of Gold Go Togethers: cute associations game with pictures for non-readers

Lucky Leprachaun’s Listening Comprehension: 14 short stories with comprehension questions, works well as a no-print activity!

St. Patrick’s Day Following Directions Before/After Concepts: fun seasonal activity for before/after concepts

St. Patty’s Directions: avoid the leprachaun and practice 1, 2, and 3 step directions!

St. Patrick’s Day Categories: low-prep activity for practicing categories

Logical Leprechauns Problem Solving: cute scenarios for students to practice problem solving and “what should you do?” type questions

Idioms: Worth Their Weight in Gold Task Cards: 10 task cards and a recording sheet for practicing idioms

Follow the Clues: St. Patrick’s Day Edition: fun game for practicing descriptive language and inferencing

St. Patrick’s Day Build Your Own Bingo: love these for vocabulary, describing, inferencing, and following directions

St. Patrick’s Day Comprehension and Bubble Map Sheets: great for reading comprehension and using graphic organizers to describe

I use interactive books almost everyday with my preschoolers so I am constantly making and putting together new ones! I use two styles of interactive books with my students. One style has the interactive picture symbols along the bottom of the page like the book below. The other style has the pictures along the right side of the book. This how to focuses on how to assemble a book in the style with the pictures along the bottom of the page.Materials needed: printer, laminate, adhesive velcro, scissors, book rings or binding coils

Step 1: Print out all the pages of the book. Cut along the dotted lines near the bottom of the pages. Cut out the picture symbols. Do NOT cut the page that has blank squares along the bottom.

Step 2: Laminate all pages. Place rough-sided velcro on the picture symbols and soft-sided velcro on the blank squares throughout the book.

Step 3: Decide whether you would like to assemble the book with book rings or with binding spines. If you are using book rings, either use a two-hole punch or a hole puncher to punch two holes in the upper 2/3rds of the book. Then use book rings to assemble the book. The full-size page with the blank squares along the bottom is the last page of the book.

Step 4: Place the picture symbols on the blank squares on the last page of the book. Your book is ready to go! Have fun reading it and seeing how engaged your students can be with interactive pieces!

I have interactive books that cover dozens of themes and language concepts! To see all the interactive book sets available click here!

Welcome to the new website for Communication Window! While it is still under construction, I am very excited to be building a new site that will offer a ton of useful information and materials for speech pathologists, teachers, special educators and parents.

This site will focus on providing information for facilitating speech and language growth in children, especially children with speech and language delays and/or autism. It will also provide links to load of free or low-cost materials for working on many different speech and language skills!

Please come back soon to see all the great things I have in store!