Beach Themed Speech Therapy Activities for Summer

Whether you’re an SLP living on the coast or that landlocked life (that's me), the beach is a hot summer theme for speech therapy. In fact, a speech therapy session is one of my favorite places to enjoy the beach. What? I know, I’m weird. Sand is just so… sandy 😜

But like the ocean horizon itself, the possibilities for using a beach theme in speech therapy are endless. From sandcastles to ocean animals, many of our students’ favorite topics are related to a beach or ocean theme... not to mention all of the vocabulary and language concepts!

Beach Themed PDF Activities

Here is a beach-themed digital PDF to target several speech therapy goals including past tense verbs, story inferencing, antonyms, articulation, and more with your preschool and early elementary students.

Take a field trip under the sea! Using this aquarium virtual field trip, students learn about the ocean and ocean animals. The real photos draw students in and prompt a lot of language.

Beach Themed Boom Card Activities

This summer comprehension and inferencing Boom Card deck includes a couple of ocean-themed passages that make targeting language goals easy with elementary students. Why? No more digging for shells, I mean reading passages, before the session!

Use this ocean scene creator Boom Card deck to let your students be creative while practicing their articulation. An open-ended card (without target words) even gives the chance to use the activity with language students too!

Don’t miss this FREE Boom Card deck that targets answering beach-themed wh- questions. The visuals are super helpful for some students in teaching the types of wh- questions and the colorful pictures are engaging too!

Beach Themed Books for Speech Therapy

Search the following book titles/authors wherever you access digital versions of books (your local library, YouTube, websites, online stores, etc.).

• Harry By the Sea by Gene Zion

• How To Code a Sandcastle by Josh Funk

• The Sandcastle That Lola Built by Megan Maynor

• The Mermaid by Jan Brett

• Mister Seahorse and A House for Hermit Crab by Eric Carle

• The Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister

Beach Themed Websites and Games

Aqua Friends is a puzzle activity on ABCYa.com that is fun for elementary students, even if you use it as a warm-up while students arrive or to fill the last few minutes of the speech therapy session.

Toy Theater’s virtual fishing game allows students to try and catch a fish while avoiding the jellyfish. The website's sticker activity also includes an ocean background and tons of ocean-themed digital stickers that can be added to it. Oh, the language therapy possibilities of such an open-ended activity!

Sandcastle is a Daniel Tiger activity on PBS Kids that gives students a chance to build their own virtual sandcastle! If you're doing in-person therapy (and feeling very brave), you could bring in real sand for your therapy sessions.

If you like to have a couple of coloring pages relevant to the theme, check out these beach pictures on thecolor.com that can be colored digitally or printed.

For the teletherapists— Having a game of digital memory on standby is a lifesaver for filling extra time or waiting for late arrivals. This one uses real photos and works great for our beach theme, and here's one for ocean animals too.

For students working on inferencing or multiple meanings, these ocean and beach jokes from Glow Worm Books make for a fun activity!

Beach Themed Videos for Speech Therapy

This simple video is great for preschoolers, as it shows videos of children playing at the beach and talking about swimming, finding seashells and hermit crabs, and building sandcastles. Another fun preschool activity is this virtual field trip to the beach which talks about items to bring for fun in the sun.

For slightly older students, this National Geographic video teaches about the oceans of our world. It answers questions such as, "Why is ocean water salty?" and "How is the ocean changing due to climate change?" It's perfect for targeting comprehension, inferencing, vocabulary in context, and more! This National Geographic Kids video discusses the camera that scuba divers use to get photos and videos of ocean animals such as sharks!

This informational video compares the different oceans of the world while this one highlights some of the most beautiful beaches. Students love to share which one they'd choose to visit, and why!

Beach Themed Activities for Older Students

Even our big kids can have fun with beach-themed activities! I love to find articles and passages that put an interesting spin on the theme. This one from Newsala is about the danger that plastic poses to the ocean. This website resource from National Geographic Kids discusses beaches and even includes underlined vocabulary words.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record here, I love doing funny fill-in-the-blank stories with older kids. This one is part of my summer packet of Speech Libs and talks about the biggest type of shark in the world.

As you can see, I've paired it with a live webcam from the Georgia Aquarium!

This personality quiz on National Geographic Kids aims to determine which ocean animal you are, providing another light-hearted way to incorporate the beach and ocean theme.

Life, no, speech therapy is a beach with these ready-to-go resources to help you target speech and language goals across your caseload. Just bookmark your favorite beach-themed activities (or use this Google spreadsheet so it’s ready to go for next year) and there’s no doubt you’ll be making waves in your speech therapy sessions!

NOTE: Several of the links in this post go to websites for which I have no affiliation. The links are provided for your convenience only. This post does not signify endorsement of any of the above websites or resources (other than those I have created on TpT and/or Boom Learning), and I have no responsibility or liability for any of the other content or information shared in this post.

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