Birthday Activities for Speech Therapy (Free Ideas!)

Imagine this– You greet your students at the beginning of a speech therapy session when one of them exclaims, "It's my birthday!" Eeek. Wish you'd known sooner. You feel a little guilty as you scramble to find a way to recognize your student's special day.

So it probably doesn't take a ton of imagining, because like every SLP ever, this has probably happened to you. Student birthdays come around pretty regularly... thanks to most SLPs' caseload size. 

As SLPs, we often pivot. We figure out something and make it work. But wouldn't it be nice to skip that moment of struggle and have a list of quick activities that you can use to give a little birthday shout-out to your (virtual or in-person) student?

Check out these fun ways to celebrate birthdays in speech therapy and teletherapy with students of all ages, while still weaving in some speech and language goals, too! And since these ideas are all just a click away, you'll be able to pull them up so quickly that it'll seem like it was part of the plan all along.

Birthday Activities for Speech Therapy

Skip the stress while still making the birthday girl or boy feel special! These speech therapy activities make it easy to add a little fun while still working toward your student's goals. I've included ideas for younger and older students (plus options for teletherapy), so you can find something that works whether you have five minutes to fill or want to make the birthday the theme of the whole session.

Activities for Younger Students

These birthday speech therapy activities are ready to celebrate while sneaking in speech and language practice. From virtual birthday parties to books and simple online games, you can easily turn a regular session into a little birthday celebration!

Boom Cards

This Boom Card deck (free for email subscribers) helps you personalize the celebration by adding details like the student's name, date of birth, age, and birthday wish as they follow directions to set up a virtual party– complete with the playing of "Happy Birthday!" to sing along to!

Language Scenes

Picture scenes are a simple, versatile way to target a variety of language skills, and birthdays give you a fun theme to work with! Students can plan and create a birthday party scene while you target following directions, answering questions, describing, formulating sentences, and more.

No-Print Activity

Digital stickers are a versatile activity for any teletherapy session, including birthdays! Students can layer digital stickers on top of a photo background to create their own birthday party scene. Make it even more personal by using a photo of the student's house or adding the faces of family members, friends, or group members.

Email subscribers can get a set of birthday stickers + background in the freebie library, and I have another set available in my store!

Printable version

There's also a printable scene in black ink that you can use as a coloring page. Pair it with birthday-themed stickers (I found these on Amazon) to create a hands-on scene for targeting following directions, answering open-ended questions, describing, and formulating complex sentences.

Website Games and Activities

• This simple Tiny Tap activity allows students to click through a birthday scene while discussing vocabulary and concepts such as opening presents and singing Happy Birthday. Great for your youngest students!

• If you subscribe to ABCYa, preschoolers may enjoy this Birthday Candle Counting activity to find out how old each person is turning. The ABCYa website also has this Make a Cupcake Activity! 

• PBS Kids has a Daniel Tiger Birthday Buddy activity that includes multiple digital activities for celebrating a birthday, including decorating for a party and making cupcakes. The activities actually take the perspective of being a "birthday buddy" to someone who's having a birthday, so they're perfect for including all members of a group! 

• This awesome site has personalized birthday songs for thousands of names that you can play

Books

As with any theme, you can always find a book to coordinate! A few titles to look for include If You Give a Pig a Party, There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Birthday Cake, and How Do Dinosaurs Say Happy Birthday? 

As you read, you can easily work in speech and language goals by having students find words with their target sounds, answer WH questions about the story, describe the characters and events, or make predictions about what will happen next.

No matter which activity you choose, younger students love it if you're dressed for the occasion! Be prepared with a party hat, party horn, and some balloons in your desk drawer for birthdays. In teletherapy, I've even shown my own kids' Melissa & Doug Birthday Cake set on camera before. 

Activities for Older Students

If the above ideas are too "little kid-ish" for your middle and high school students, don't worry. There are a few ways you can bring some birthday fun into their speech therapy sessions too! 

If you know me, you know that fill-in-the-blank stories are a go-to for fun-filled speech sessions. Grab a FREE birthday-themed story here, and let the laughter roll as you and a student (or small group) create a hilarious birthday narrative.

Personality quizzes are always a fun way for students to share about themselves and get to know one another. They also elicit so much natural conversation! This Scholastic quiz asks a handful of questions to determine a student's "birthday style."

Group Games 101 hosts a huge set of birthday-themed trivia questions, which include answers that are hidden until you click on them. Perfect for screen sharing! This birthday quiz from WordWall asks questions about birthday traditions from around the world... and has real photos!

Simon's Cat has a Guide to Birthdays video that includes funny ways that Simon celebrates his birthdays. And this video celebrates the 10th Birthday of the channel.

Teletherapy Birthday Activities

Most of the ideas mentioned above can work in the virtual setting, but here are a few more!

The beauty of the virtual setting is that you can take the party anywhere! For many platforms (like Zoom), you can change the virtual background to whatever you want... an arcade, basketball court, top of a mountain, you name it! All you need is a Google Image search, and you have the party backdrop.

Then allow the birthday boy or girl to choose what else goes in the party background, such as people (real friends or family, famous people, or other characters), decorations, and food! Thanks to Jenelle Gococo from @sayspeech for this awesome idea!

And to go out with a bang– confetti! Chrome extensions make it possible to do just about anything virtually, and throwing confetti is no exception! A couple of examples include Confetti Cannon and Confetti Confetti All Over. The best part? No vacuum required!

We've all experienced the feeling of being unprepared for a student's birthday. Luckily, this blog post has tons of activities you can pull out of a hat to celebrate birthdays in speech therapy. With a quick pivot, you can make your students feel special with a birthday-themed session, no matter how old they're turning... or how prepared you are!

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