Love is In The Air: Creating a Valentine's Theme for Speech Therapy

Holidays provide meaningful opportunities to engage students in therapy while making learning enjoyable. Valentine’s Day, in particular, offers many creative ways to target language, articulation, and social communication skills within a functional and motivating context.

Language: Fostering Meaningful Communication

  1. Resources such as Canva, PowerPoint, and Pink Cat Games can be used to create slides depicting Valentine’s Day scenes. Having students describe aspects of the illustrations, such as flowers, chocolates, cards, and candy, is an effective way to encourage the functional use of adjectives and descriptive language.
  2. Valentine’s-themed items can also be used for compare-and-contrast activities (e.g., different kinds of candy or types of flowers) to build vocabulary, categorization skills, and expressive language.

Articulation: Word Lists and Beyond

  1. One fun and adaptable way to incorporate Valentine’s Day into a therapy session is by playing a themed game of Would You Rather. Creating holiday-related questions opens opportunities for naturalistic discussion while allowing the clinician to listen closely for target sounds and carryover.
  2. Craft activities are another engaging way to take articulation drills to the next level. Creative pairings of speech sounds with Valentine’s crafts, such as making a Mad Libs page, creating a “love bug,” or completing a themed articulation dot-art page, help maintain motivation while supporting speech practice.

Social Language: The Possibilities Are Endless

  1. Holidays are also ideal for addressing higher-level language and social skills. Realistic scenarios can be applied to students’ own experiences, such as discussing manners when receiving gifts or identifying kind and appropriate ways to show care for others.
  2. Practicing giving and receiving compliments through structured games allows students to share joy and kindness in ways that are meaningful and well-received by peers.

These ideas demonstrate how imagination and clinical expertise can come together to make speech therapy enjoyable, functional, and full of care for our clients.

Hannah Collie, M.S., CCC-SLP