Using a Play Kitchen in Speech Therapy

A food theme is a great theme to transition into the new year and a toy kitchen is the perfect way to bring that theme to life in your speech therapy sessions! Whether you use pretend food sets, a toy kitchen, or kitchen supplies/utensils found in your own kitchen, the speech and language skills are endless. Here are just a few ways you can work on these skills with your caseload:

Following Directions: set up a "restaurant" with your student. Have your student listen carefully to what you would like for lunch (e.g., I will first have some coffee and then I would like a cheese pizza; first cut the bread, then put some peanut butter on top).

Sequencing: use a variety of food play sets to work on the sequences on how to cook/bake different food dishes. E.g., how to bake a cake; how to make a sandwich, how to make pizza.

Spatial Concepts: practice spatial concepts IN (in the bowl, in the sink, in the oven); ON (on the plate, on the spoon, on the toast).

Basic Concepts: hot/cold, full/empty, small/big, hard/soft, sweet/sour.

Speech Sounds: S-BLENDS (e.g., stir, snack, smell, spoon, stove, scone); K SOUNDS (e.g., cut, cookie, can, bake), L-BLENDS (e.g., plate, blueberries, glass, clean, flip, blackberries), R-BLENDS (e.g., bread, crab, crumbs, tray, green beans, fruit, fries).

Syllable Segmentation: potatoes = 3 syllables, bacon = 2 syllables, peas = 1 syllable.

Initial/Medial/Final Sound Identification: pot - initial sound /p/, bun - final sound /n/.

Phoneme Segmentation: milk = 4 sounds, can = 3 sounds.

If you love using play based speech therapy in your speech therapy sessions check out our website and join our email list here for tons of therapy ideas and freebies you can use in your sessions right away!