1 How to Use Visual Supports with Arts & Crafts

How To Use Visual Supports With Arts & Crafts

By Speech Therapy Teacher 

Visual support can be very helpful in speech therapy, especially when used in conjunction with crafts. Crafts can be a fun and engaging way to target speech and language goals while also providing a visual and hands-on element to the therapy session.

Here are a few ideas for incorporating crafts into speech therapy with visual supports:

Picture-based crafts: Use pictures to create crafts that relate to the target sounds or language concepts. For example, you could create a craft that involves gluing pictures of objects that start with the /k/ sound onto a cardboard letter K.

Visual sentence strips: Create sentence strips with visual supports to help target sentence structure and grammar. For example, you could create a sentence strip that shows a picture of a boy, a dog, and a ball, and then have the child put the words in the correct order to make a sentence, "The boy threw the ball to the dog."

Articulation matching games: Create a game where the child has to match pictures of objects that contain their target sound to a corresponding picture or word card. For example, if their target sound is /s/, you could have pictures of a snake, sun, and socks, and they would have to match them to the corresponding picture or word card.

Storytelling crafts: Create crafts that can be used to tell stories and target language skills like sequencing and retelling. For example, you could create a story stick with pictures of different characters and objects, and the child could use it to tell a story and practice sequencing the events.

Overall, using visual support with crafts can be a great way to make speech therapy more engaging and effective. By incorporating hands-on and visual elements, children are more likely to be motivated and have fun while working on their speech and language skills.