I love finding a great website to use in therapy, and today I’d like to share my top 5 favorites! (Bonus: all of them are free to use!)
The Kid Should See This
AGE LEVEL: ALL
This website features a library of fun, short video clips that are kid-appropriate. They cover all topics, but have a special focus on science, technology, engineering, and math. You can search by keyword or topic area (science, technology, space, animals, nature, food, DIY, music, art, animation, or random).
You can use these videos to target goals such as articulation (find videos that have items with your students’ target sounds and retell them), grammar (retell what happened in the video, using appropriate sentence structure, pronouns, and past tense verbs), and language skills (inferring what is going to happen next, compare and contrast, describing skills, answering WH questions, listening comprehension, main idea and supporting details). The videos could also be used as a reward at the end of a session.
Epic
AGE LEVEL: Pre-K to Middle School
Free for educators, this site can read books aloud, and it has an excellent selection of titles available, including Splat the Cat, Harry the Dirty Dog, and Harold and the Purple Crayon. Some books include the pictures, where some are audiobooks. You can select books as favorites to come back to, which makes it easy to bookmark them for later therapy sessions. Bonus: it can save you money, especially as a newer therapist still building your therapy library – and is terrific for traveling therapists!
Vocab Grabber
AGE LEVEL: Upper Elementary, Middle School, High School
VocabGrabber (which I first heard about from my friend Hallie over at Speech Time Fun) allows you to copy and paste any section of text that you want to use, and it will show you the most useful vocabulary words, and will also let you sort the words by general category. You can then use this to really focus on the most meaningful and useful vocabulary words in your instruction.
Sounds of Speech 3.0 from the University of Iowa
https://soundsofspeech.uiowa.edu/main/english
AGE LEVEL: 1st grade on up
This website (which requires a free login) is great for articulation, as it shows exactly how to make all of the sounds and what the mouth should look like when producing each sound. It includes consonants (sorted by manner/place/voice) and vowels (including diphthongs).
ABCya
AGE LEVEL: Preschool through third grade
ABCya.com has a variety of different educational games at different levels and for different themes. For example, when I searched for “Earth Day” games, I found a sorting game for recycling that would be perfect to use to target categories and similarities/differences. I also found games called “Parts of Speech” Quests that target things like nouns, verbs, and adjectives. They also have games that could be used as more open-ended rewards, too.
Runner Up Sites
Newsela.com (great for relevant and timely news articles which have adjustable reading levels)
GoNoodle.com (great movement breaks for all ages)
this list is so great! I am a student clinician getting started with teletherapy and I am excited to use these links in my sessions!
Thank you for recommending the web site “The Kid Should See This”. If you could have seen the joy on my student’s face today when I showed him a cicada video, you would have teared up like I did. Cicadas are his absolute favorite creatures in the world. Such a great web site. Thank you again.