First Speech Session with Older Students

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Great teachers focus not on compliance, but on connections and relationships. P.J. Caposey

The first week of speech therapy with middle and high school students can be tricky. You want to do the “by the book” thing and start collecting baseline data, you want to start working on the goals so students can make progress, but you NEED to build rapport with your students. The relationships built in the first few weeks of school can influence how hard students will work for the rest of the school year. Because they’re completing “getting to know you” activities in nearly every class, I try to keep things fresh and fun. I’ve compiled some of my favorite getting to know you and first week of school activities so you can start building relationships with students from your very first day!

Games

Simple games like Uno and LCR (Left Center Right) are great for the first week of speech therapy. Most students already know how to play or can learn quickly. While playing you have the perfect opportunity to chat and get to know one another. You can make up “extra” rules to get to know each other better. For example, if someone plays a “Wild” card, they ask the other players a question, or if you have to “Draw Two,” you have to share two things about yourself. Games are fun and can give you a glimpse into a student’s true personality!

Collaborative Puzzle

A few years ago, I bought a 1,000 piece Movie Puzzle for the first week of speech. During the week, the students and I worked on the puzzle and chatted as we worked. Surprisingly, very few students actually knew how to put a puzzle together, so I did end up doing the lion’s share of the work. I would definitely recommend a 500 piece puzzle for your speech room! I now have the puzzle mounted in my room and the students love finding all of the different movie scenes hidden in the puzzle.

In conjunction with the puzzle, students completed a puzzle “piece” with information about themselves. Each student wrote their favorite food, website, movie, thing to listen to, and thing to do outside of school on their puzzle piece and we shared our pieces with one another. I connected our pieces on the bulletin board to decorate the speech room for the first semester. I found the puzzle pieces on TpT for just a few dollars and printed them on to colorful paper.

Digital Notebook

The beginning of the 20/21 school year was rough as many of us completed our first week of therapy virtually, and those of us who were in-person were trying to practice social distancing. To prepare for this very odd first week of school, I created a Digital Notebook for students to complete on their devices. The notebook consists of 4 slides for the student to complete: find a funny joke, insert a meme, find and and interpret a quote, and answer a question. The “notebook” is in Google Slides, so once we were finished, we presented our slideshows to each other. The Digital Notebook is a FREE download in my TpT store! I think this continues to be a great activity if you co-teach a larger class or if you have students who prefer Digital work. Students can work independently, and when they’re done, you can present the notebooks so the students can share theirs.

Lie to me

Two Truths and a Lie is a go-to activity to get to know your students. I have had a lot of trouble with students understanding the premise of the game. Many will tell more than one lie or all truths. To help students manage the instructions, I give them a simple slip of paper prompting them to write two things that are true and one lie. There are three versions of the prompts with the truths and the lie in different positions. When it is time to share, students can read their slip from top to bottom instead of manipulating the truths and lie from memory. Get the free Slides version of my Two Truths and a Lie HERE!

Frank Conversations and Planning

Some older students may not appreciate a rapport building game or activity. They’ve been in speech for a very long time, they know the drill, and they want to be dismissed. With these students I spend the first week talking about their IEP, goals, and (as appropriate) the dismissal plan. I may use the getting to know you activities to take baseline data for articulation and fluency in structured conversational speech. For a motivated student, we begin the year by making graphs for them to track their progress toward their objectives….and if we finish early, I might just try to convince them to play a game of Uno with me!

Do you have any great ideas for the first week of speech therapy? If so, leave me a comment!