My #1 Easy Hack for Teaching Social Language

I think whoever is setting the home-ware trends is either married to an SLP, or used to be an SLP and have now changed jobs because there speech and thought bubble paraphernalia galore! I use these in therapy with my social kids all the time and wanted to share the BEST and SIMPLEST thing that I bought.

I found these stickers for $2 at Kmart, but have seen similar at other craft stores. At first I considered putting the stickers directly onto the pages of my books, but I sort of like clean pages. So all I did was get some clear transparency sheets, cut them into squares and put the stickers on. If you can’t find speech+thought bubble stickers, just print out a picture, cut and laminate. As we read our books it is then really easy to put either a thought bubble or speech bubble on top of the character and have the child articulate what that person might be thinking or saying.

Use it for:

• Your social-communication students: It is WONDERFUL for Theory of Mind and taking perspectives. My #1 book is Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus by Mo Willems for the range of emotions, minimal text and use of Thought Bubbles in the pictures. You can also use this to teach non-verbal language such as facial expressions, body language and emotions. I have some Thoughts & Feelings Cards similar to these stickers that you can also put above a character’s head to specifically name the feeling.
• Your language-delayed students: Practice asking questions and multiple vocabulary/grammar/syntax goals. You can place the speech bubble in front of the character and prompt (What could he say to the monster?).
• Your speech students: A lot of us have books that have alliterative vocabulary or themed to a particular sound (e.g. snowman books for ‘sn’ clusters), so this is another fun and different way for students to practice using their targeted sounds in phrase and sentence levels.

I love writing about social language, so search through my other blog posts on similar topics… they may be thought and speech bubble related too 🙂 Here’s a selection: 10 YouTube videos you need for social skills therapy, A simple way to teach theory of mind and Lessons I’ve learned dabbling in Social Thinking.