Speech & Language Activities for an Entire School Year

Wouldn’t it be great to have activities ready to go for every single session? What about having an activity available each week? Even better, activities that focus on keeping your students engaged by teaching them new strategies all while working on their goals. We used to stress about planning sessions every day – so we wanted to create a resource we could pull out at any time. Our Yearlong Weekly Responses Notebook is a great tool to have handy for any day of the week, any time of the day, at any moment in time.

Monthly Skill & Strategy

This resource includes a new strategy each month. At the beginning of every month, this resource offers a mini-lesson to guide your session and to teach a new strategy. It includes a topic, aim, explanation and a breakdown of the strategy. Then it’s time to practice the strategy during that month. Your students will now have the opportunity to practice the new strategy in an activity for a total of 4 activities in the month.

Weekly Short Writing Response

Weekly short responses give students the opportunity to practice their writing skills. It’s a short response, so no more than 4 sentences to complete the task – as long as they respond appropriately to the prompt of course. There is a writing prompt for each week of the entire year. No matter what type of writing prompt it is, students must write an explanation including reasons or details to elaborate on their response. Here are some of our favorite writing prompts for each category:

Would You Rather…
- Would you rather have eyes that can film everything or ears that can record everything?
Personal Experiences
- Write about your earliest memory of a holiday celebration.
Hypothetical Questions
- What if you could travel back in time, where would you go and why?
Debatable topics
- Should students be required to volunteer in the community?

How to Incorporate Weekly Responses into your Classroom

Weekly responses can be used in many different ways. You can use it on a consistent basis and make it part of your routine, or you can use it on an as needed basis – it’s up to you.

Do Now Activity: Assign this in the beginning of the session as a quick and easy do now activity. It presents as a nice warm up activity to work into your class routine.
Keep Students Active: The last thing you want is to have administration walk in and your student is sitting at their desk with their phone out. Refer to this when students in your class finish their work before everyone else or are sitting at their desk with nothing to do. Keep them active by giving them a strategy to practice, along with a writing prompt. Keep them busy at their desk, so that they are always actively engaged.
Review a Strategy: Did your students forget how to use a strategy that you’ve taught them in the past? This happens to us all the time. It’s never a bad idea to revisit a skill and reteach a strategy. Use the strategy sheet for a quick refresher.
Teach a New Strategy: We have a toolbox filled with strategies for all different skills. Teach students a new strategy each month or whenever you want. The skills sheet provides you with an aim, explanation, and breakdown of the lesson to teach the first week of the month. Each week following, students have the opportunity to practice using the strategy. The first few weeks, students may need extra support and prompting, and usually by week 3 and 4 of the month, the student has made progress and can use the strategy successfully.

HOW TO PRESENT WEEKLY RESPONSES

Skills Sheet:

Print and hang in your classroom as a poster. We love to use Astrobrights to give the skills poster a pop of color in our room.
Print and keep them in your students’ notebooks or folders. It’s an easy reference sheet for students to refer to when they are transitioning learned skills into the classroom.

Print & Bind:

Print the entire resource and bind it for your students. It will now become a workbook that the students can continue to reference throughout the school year. We love our binding machine and use it quite often.

Digital:

Prefer working on the computer? Or perhaps your students prefer to type? Use the Google Version, make a digital copy, and share it with your students or post it in your google classroom as an assignment for your students to work on throughout the year. Textboxes allow students to type directly into the document.

We are always teaching our students strategies to access the curriculum and transition their skills into the classroom to help them with their academic classes. Not only do we have a first edition of the weekly responses, but we created a 2nd edition with all new strategies. Some targeted skills include: executive function skills, context clues, paraphrasing, note taking, opinion writing, oral language, annotating, citing evidence, figurative language, argumentative writing, and so much more!

If this is your first time visiting NYC Speechies, welcome! We give tips to work on receptive and expressive language with the older students on our Instagram page, so make sure to follow us. And don’t forget to sign up to receive emails with updates and freebies!