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5 Tips For Planning A Productive Large Speech & Language Group

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As SLPs, we have to juggle high caseload numbers while planning effective sessions. This means we will often have to plan for many speech and language skills within a large group of students or even teach lessons to entire classes.

To help you dominate your large groups of five or more students, we have effective planning tips to make your life easier. Plus be sure to grab our freebie planning template to set yourself up for speech group success!

5 tips for planning large group sessions

5 Tips For Productive Large Group Speech & Language Sessions

1. Read a repetitive book

We all use books and incorporate literacy into our sessions, but for a large group language session, try a repetitive books to increase language output. Books with call and response or repetitive phrases are a great way to get multiple students engaged at one time.

Check out the list below of some of our favorite repetitive books!

2. Incorporate music

Our students LOVE music! And one of the most effective tools to encourage language is to pair skills with a song. And once the music starts so does the movement followed by language output. Songs are a great way to help regulate any student struggling to focus during a larger group lesson while still facilitating language production.

Check out the list below of some of our favorite get up and moving songs used to target direction following, language concepts, and more!

3. Co-treat

Grab a co-worker and plan a lesson together! Have your fellow occupational therapist, social worker, special education teacher, or physical therapist bring their expertise to a joint large group session.

I typically work super closely with my building’s social worker so we plan weekly whole class lessons targeting cooperative game play. These large group sessions allow us to model turn taking, practice frequently used phrases, and provide visuals. The class had a blast learning several familiar childhood games such as “Rock, Paper, Scissors”, “Simon Says”, & “Duck, Duck, Goose”. We even busted out the parachute one day and played musical chairs on another.

Students will benefit from using multiple skill sets in a natural context. Plus it always helps to have more input in the planning process!

4. Visual cues for speech sounds or movements

Just because you have a larger group of students doesn’t mean you can’t target specific sounds or oral motor movement! We love these visual speech cue cards to warm everybody up before the group starts.

Mandy likes to use these interactive cards at the beginning of each large group lesson with all of her students. The movements and corresponding speech sound production become part of their routine and then more effectively targeted throughout the session.

Grab these Oral Motor Exam Assessment Cards by Adventures in Speech Pathology here!

5. Over plan

Have you ever started an activity and then very quickly finished that activity? 😬 Yea…we know the feeling. Nothing is worse than running through all of your planned activities and having lots of time to fill still! Our final tip for planning effective large group speech sessions is to OVER plan.

For a 30 minute session, we typically have 4-5 activities ready to go. If you don’t end up using everything, you will have material for the next large group session or reinforcing activities for your small group sessions. Win, win!

Want a template to help not only plan, but over plan your large group sessions? Download this organizational freebie to effortlessly plan five activities per weekly lesson!

large speech group planning template

Now you have 5 awesome tips to help you plan the most epic large group speech sessions! Did we miss something? Drop us a comment below to let us know your go-to strategy for your large speech and language sessions. Be sure to share this post to spread the wealth!

5 tips for planning large group speech and language sessions

Happy planning, SLPs!

Talking Mama Bears