As speech-language pathologists, we are always looking for speech therapy activities that are fun and effective! That’s why I love using articulation stories. Articulation stories are a great way to not only ease our students through the hierarchy of speech (word level, sentence level, story level, etc), but also promote articulation carryover!
Why Use Articulation Stories in Speech Therapy?
There are many benefits to using sound-loaded stories in your practice. Personally, I love incorporating literacy skills (either directly or indirectly) into articulation therapy as much as possible. When you use short stories in articulation, they can indirectly aid your students’ reading development and comprehension skills. Students also get exposed to a wide variety of vocabulary words and after multiple readings of the same passage, students can also improve their reading fluency skills. Ultimately, anything we can do to help our students succeed in the curriculum is amazing and highly beneficial!
Tips for Using Sound-Loaded Stories
- Meet your students exactly where they are at! If your younger students are not yet reading, you can still use short stories in your speech therapy sessions! Start with practicing at the word level.
- Read the story to your students first. This will not only provide students with auditory bombardment, but it will also model reading fluency.
- Second, go through the short story and have students highlight or underline their target words. If your student is at the word level, start by just practicing the target words found in the story. These repetitive drills can be motivating, because the ultimate goal will be to eventually use the words in the reading passage.
- You can also practice at the sentence level! You can read a sentence and then your student can repeat the sentence. Recalling sentences will not only work on the target sounds at the sentence level, but also improve cognitive skills such as memory! There are truly so many ways to use articulation stories instead of just reading them.
- Always keep the end goal in mind. The goal is to improve articulation skills, although tempting.. we don’t want to steal articulation practice time with explicit reading instruction.
Articulation Stories Worksheets for Speech Therapy
I have created hundreds of articulation stories in all word positions! They can all be found in my membership for speech therapists – The Speech is Sweet Club!
There are 23 packets total (for all different sounds (ex. r s z l, and blends (s blends, r blends, and l blends). They can also be found in my TPT Store individually, in a Super Mega Bundle (for the best savings), or broken up into Early Sounds and Later Sounds Bundles. The early sound bundle addresses: k, g, f, v, p, b, t, d, m, n, h, and w. The later sounds bundle addresses: s, z sounds, th, sh, ch, j, l, r, s blends, l blends, and r blends.
Each packet features 10 stories in the initial position, 10 stories in the medial position, and 10 stories in the final position! That’s 30 total stories per speech sound, above are examples from the s articulation stories!
Every page provides 6-10 target words along with accompanying WH questions (who, what, when, where, and why). I think these will be a big hit with your articulation students and they’re also great to send home for speech therapy homework! These printables are also a great no prep resource that will save you so much time! Just print n’ go!
Oral Reading Strategies
Articulation stories may be intimidating, especially if you’re working with students who are not yet reading. But have no fear! Sound loaded stories are an excellent way to target speech sounds with all students, no matter their reading abilities! Here are two strategies you can integrate seamlessly into your therapy!
Echo Reading
Echo reading is an oral reading strategy where the teacher, parent, or speech-language pathologist reads a portion of a reading passage aloud and then the student(s) repeat it! They are essentially echoing you! This process can be repeated as much as you would like! I highly recommend utilizing this strategy with articulation stories! You can start by reading one sentence at a time and having your students echo and then you can gradually have students repeat larger chunks of the story. Echo reading can improve reading fluency, comprehension, and memory skills! It’s also a great way to practice articulation skills at the sentence level.
This strategy is also a great way to discover the words your students are struggling with the most. You can then spend extra time working on those particular words at the word level. Echo reading is a great way to tackle sound-loaded sentences!
Choral Reading
Choral reading is another oral reading strategy where the instructor and the students read a passage simultaneously (like a chorus!). Choral reading is a great way to build your students’ confidence in practicing their speech sounds at the reading level. It also provides them with modeling and another way to improve their reading fluency skills. After your students gain confidence in echo reading, I highly recommend transitioning over to choral reading. Combining these two strategies will get you a high level of repetitions for sure! Looking for other ways to get 100+ trials in a session, check out my blog post 5 Ideas to Reach 100 Trials!
Using Stories Mixed Groups
There are so many reasons to use articulation stories into your speech therapy sessions, but one of the main benefits is that they can be used with mixed groups or with students with mixed goals (students who have speech and language goals)! Scheduling speech therapy sessions is an immense feat! It’s hard work! haha! It’s truly impossible to have groups that only consist of articulation students if you have a large caseload. Using these stories will make planning therapy so much easier! You won’t have to use a whole slew of products!
Each short story is followed by five wh-questions! Your language students can work on comprehension and answering who, what, when, where, and why questions!
Other language goals you can address with these passages:
- describing (pick out a character or an object in the story and describe it)
- compare/contrast things in the story
- verb tense (you can have students retell the story in present, future, or past tense)
- pronouns
- story retelling
Articulation Stories Conclusion
Articulation stories are a fabulous way to indirectly work on reading skills with your speech therapy students. They’re also perfect to use with mixed groups! These articulation resources allow you to work on a wide variety of target sounds with your articulation students and a wide array of language skills with your language students. I highly recommend giving them a try! They’re also great resources for home practice!
Want to peek inside some of the individual packets? Check out these blog posts:
S Articulation Stories Printables
If you’re looking for more resources on WH Questions, please see these blog posts:
WH Question Toolkit Review
150 WH Questions for Speech Therapy
Gain ALL ACCESS to these articulation stories + all of my materials in The Speech is Sweet Club! Join hundreds of like-minded SLPs today!
Thank you for visiting my blog! Have a wonderful day!
