Five Ways to Use Popsicle Sticks in Your Speech Therapy Sessions

July is here! And in the Northern Hemisphere, that means sunny days, summer breaks, and plenty of popsicles. While you probably aren’t saving the sticks from your frozen treats, craft sticks (AKA popsicle sticks) are affordable to buy in bulk, and they’re fun, versatile, and perfect for targeting a wide variety of goals.

Here are five of my favorite ways to use these humble heroes in your speech therapy sessions (during summer and beyond!):

Build It and Describe It

Popsicle sticks are perfect building materials for kid-sized construction projects! Give your students a stack of sticks, along with tape, paper clips, or pipe cleaners, and challenge them to build a structure (e.g., a tent, a bridge, the tallest tower possible), then describe what they built and how they built it. This activity could work for almost any age group, and it’s an authentic opportunity to target problem-solving, teamwork, sequencing, and more.

Discussion Sticks

For middle school or high school students who are working on conversation skills, try writing a thought-provoking prompt (e.g., “If you could change one thing about school, what would it be?”) on each popsicle stick, and then inviting students to select a stick and discuss their answers.

For students who need extra support with interaction and topic maintenance, you could also prepare some “follow-up question sticks!” With this activity, students can practice perspective-taking, active listening, identifying facts and opinions, and using supporting details, and they can even build foundational skills for persuasive writing.

Emotion Sticks

There are so many ways to address social-emotional learning with popsicle sticks! You could draw facial expressions on them and have students generate scenarios to match the emotion(s) related to the facial expression. (If drawing isn’t your thing, you could print pictures or cut them out from magazines/newspapers and glue them to the sticks, or even use stickers!)

Or, you could do this activity in reverse by writing short social scenarios on the sticks, and then asking students to identify and discuss the emotions that might occur in those situations. After students are familiar with these activities, they could write or draw their own pictures and scenarios!

Make-a-Story Sticks

Write a variety of story elements (characters, settings, problems, solutions, emotions, etc.) on different popsicle sticks, and place them in a cup or a small box. Have students draw a given number of sticks, and then use them as prompts to create an original story. This activity can easily be scaffolded for various age groups, and it’s a low-prep way to work on narrative, sequencing, grammar, language expansion, and social-emotional learning. Students could also create prompts for each other!

Speech Stick Scavenger Hunt

Summer is a great time for active speech sessions, and popsicle sticks make it easy to get moving! Try writing an articulation target word on each stick, and then hiding them around the speech room (or outdoors, for extra summer fun!). Students can search for the sticks, and say the words a specified number of times as they find them. You could also make this into a mixed articulation and language group activity by asking students to create sentences with the target words, group the words into categories, compare and contrast the words, or brainstorm synonyms and antonyms for the words.

I hope you have plenty of summer fun with these ideas for popsicle stick speech sessions, and if you have any to add to the list, please let me know!

And if you’re looking for simple, effective digital materials that can be used with a variety of age groups, consider signing up for a Digital SLP membership! Click here to learn more.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jessica Cassity, M.S., CCC-SLP is a speech-language pathologist in Florida. She is the founder of Digital SLP, which specializes in online speech therapy materials for busy SLPs. She also blogs and hosts a podcast, both of which can be found on The Digital SLP. In her spare time she enjoys yoga, cooking, the outdoors, and spending time with her children.