Help! There's Pirates in Speech Therapy!

As you probably already know, September 19th is Talk Like A Pirate Day. So I have been doing a pirate theme in therapy. I love to do themed therapy with my older patients. With my Early Intervention patients, I try to use as much of my themed materials as I can while adding in other toys and games to fill in the gaps. 

But for my older patients, I find that themed therapy is the easiest way for me to plan. I've been doing it for awhile now, so I've built up an arsenal of materials for most of my themes. I keep the toys/games/books in rubbermaid totes by theme. Worksheets, printables, handouts, and digital materials are all stored on my google drive and printed as needed. 

If you are thinking of doing themed therapy, here are some ideas for a pirate theme! These are all things I did over the last two weeks. My therapy session are 45-60 minutes long, one on one in a pediatric outpatient setting. If you see kids for shorter periods of time or more frequently, adapt as needed. 

Articulation: 

I love to incorporate sensory experiences into articulation therapy. 

Week #1: Sensory Bag Speech - Pirate Treasure

Week #2: Pirate Treasure Hunt Sensory Bin

I also love to do a craft in therapy, so we did this Pirate Hat Articulation activity by Speech Therapy with Courtney Gragg during week 1. 

During week 2, we completed a pirate telescope craft. I printed Super Duper Articulation pictures at 50% scale. We colored them and glued them to paper towel rolls to make a telescope. I have visual directions for this craft in my Craft Visuals Mega Pack so I could target following directions as well. 

Both weeks, I placed mini objects in these Learning Resources Treasure Chests (affiliate link) to have a little treasure hunt. This activity was a huge hit. Sometimes we had to hunt down the keys to open the treasure chests, sometimes they had to hunt for the items to put in their treasure chests. You can pair the mini objects with these Articulation Sentence Strips for more practice. 

Language: 

We also used the mini pirate chests + mini objects with these Language Prompts for Mini Objects to target language skills. 

This is definitely my most used pirate themed material for language. The Pirate Speech and Language Unit has worksheets and activities for pronouns, verb tenses, listening comprehension, categories, inferring, spatial concepts, quantity concepts, describing, colors, sequencing, and more. I can use it with just about all of my K-5 language kiddos. 

I have a variety of pirate themed materials, such as Pirate Categories (FREEBIE), Pirate Picture Chats (which are part of this bundle from Katrina Bevan), Pirate Following Directions Cards (that I can't find on TpT anymore) that I pair with games like Pop the Pirate, this Pirate-Themed Quick Drill Activity, or the 100 Challenge - Pirate Treasure activity. 

I also used several books. For my littler patients, we used "That's Not My Pirate," "Pirates Don't Change Diapers," and "Pirates Go To School." (affiliate links)

For my older patients, we read excerpts of Pirates. This books was great to target "wh" questions, listening for details, etc. 

I also have this Wipe Clean Pirate Activities book from Usborne Books and More that I use for a variety of skills. 

I often do play based therapy with my younger patients, so we used fun pirate ship toys (affiliate link), Learning Resources Treasure Chests, and a pirate-themed Mr. Potato Head. 

Social Skills: 

We worked on social skills using "Treasure Hunt Social Skills." We also used the book "Pirates Go To School" to discuss school based social skills. 

What fun things do you do for Talk Like A Pirate Day?