10 Teletherapy Articulation Activities for Older Students

What’s your first thought when you get a new middle school or high school student working on articulation? Let me guess–“What speech therapy activities will motivate this student AND facilitate progress?” 

Yep, same.

As a speech-language pathologist (SLP) serving kindergarten through 12th grade via teletherapy, I regularly work with middle and high school students with articulation goals. And I learned that while cute build-a-scene Boom Card activities are fun, they are NOT going to get a 9th grader to take me (or our teletherapy sessions) seriously.

Over the last several years, I have been on the hunt for articulation games and activities that suit the older crowd and work in a virtual therapy room. For some students, I use an overall intelligibility approach by teaching clear speech strategies, while other students need specific articulation practice. 

Digitally interactive activities that allow for functional practice of articulation targets and don’t offend my older students by being too babyish can be hard to find. Need some inspiration? Get ready for this rapid-fire round of 10 articulation ideas to include in lesson plans for your virtual sessions (although many can be used for language, too)!

Teletherapy Articulation Activities for Older Students

So... how can virtual speech therapists make articulation therapy fun and meaningful for those sometimes hard-to-please older kids? Check out these 10 activity ideas!

Category Game (for Any Articulation Sound)

As an adolescent, Scattergories was one of my favorite games, but many of my students have never played it! When given a list of categories, the student has a few minutes to think of as many words that fit in those categories and contain their target sound as they can. 

This activity also works well to increase students' awareness of their speech sounds. I use these category lists, but you (and your students) could also make up your own! And as a bonus, it's an easy way to incorporate language skills, as well!

Speed and Observation Game

My younger students are obsessed with playing these Boom Cards decks, which are similar to the game Spot It. Older children love playing Spot It too, but since clip art images might feel too childish for many of them, I often use photos or words to create a Spot It-style game using this free website. This fun articulation game is always a quick win for practicing specific speech sounds or as a warm-up or session finisher.

Memory Games for Teletherapy

Match the Memory is my go-to website for memory games for students of all ages. To find one, click 'Search' at the top and type in the target sound, such as 'r blends' or 'vocalic r'. You can then preview the images (or words) used in games to determine if they are a good fit for your older students. If you create a login, you can also make your own game for free!

Articulation Boom Card Activities

Boom Cards are a favorite for all of my students (and me), but decks for older students (especially for articulation) can be hard to find. Activities like these Articulation Word Puzzles, this Line of Four game, and this Peg Game appeal to older students. Boom Cards have the bonus of being able to be assigned to students for extra practice.

Dots and Boxes Articulation Game

Who knows the dots and boxes game? This was another of my childhood favorites. So naturally, I created a digital version for targeting articulation skills in virtual speech therapy sessions! This activity has two digital formats for teletherapy– a PDF that can be annotated and a Google Slides version.

Fill-in-the-Blank Stories

Here’s an activity that I can guarantee will bring laughter to your sessions. Seriously. My students LOVE doing Funny Fill-Ins on the National Geographic Kids website (an online version of Mad Libs) using words with their target sound. This bundle has stories in PDF form that automatically fill in as you create your word list!

This activity is ready to go in just a couple of clicks. I screen-share the website and a list of words with their target sound simultaneously using a split screen on my second monitor. I love this activity so much that I made lists of single words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs) that are organized by sound and word position and can be inserted into any story.

Digital Articulation Drawing Activities

If you're looking for something totally unique and different, check out this constellation drawing activity. Students use an annotate tool (in Adobe Reader or the whiteboard feature of their teletherapy platform) to create lines between target words (as they complete a correct production of each one), then figure out the constellation they drew. 

In this activity, students can draw their articulation targets using the drawing tool in Boom Learning (or using PDF annotation if you prefer). Let your older students try drawing this free set of /z/ words to see if they like it!

Random Holiday Passages

Silly Holiday Texts by Kiwi Speech is literally a year-round go-to. For every single day of the year, there is a page with a short passage about a random, fun holiday, including word lists for commonly targeted sounds and language prompts.

These texts are a great way to learn about interesting topics while practicing different sounds. MIXED. GROUPS. Need I say more?

Digital Ship-Sinking Articulation Game

Several of these teletherapy activities are throwbacks to favorite childhood games, and this one is no different! Battleship has allllll the elements to engage older students– strategy, competition, mystery, and more! Unfortunately, the physical game is quite hard to orchestrate through teletherapy.

However, this digital articulation activity opens in Google Slides and can often be used across multiple sessions... without a single complaint from your students😉. It's a great game to target articulation at the single word, phrase, or sentence level with a little critical thinking thrown in, too!

Online Quizzes

The last idea is one that I learned about from my students. Kahoots! are multiple-choice, game-based quizzes. Players participate simultaneously on their own devices or a shared screen. There are several different membership plans, but even the basic, free plan allows you to search through the games created by others and make your own! 

In the articulation game that I created below, I loaded the questions and answers with /s/ and /z/ words. That's some sneaky SLP magic, right there. 

One quick honorable mention– my friend and colleague Stacey at My Teletherapy Room shares about a Chrome extension called Weava. It's a great tool for highlighting a specific target sound on a page of text (such as an online article), which is a very functional activity for older kids!

Planning articulation therapy for middle and high school students in a teletherapy setting doesn't have to be stressful. By strategically integrating words with target sounds into meaningful and motivating games, activities, and websites, students in upper grade levels will put forth greater effort to make changes in their speech production. And even if they won't admit it, they might just have a little fun along the way 😊

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