Goal-directed Summer Homework

Do you send goal-directed speech therapy summer homework to your students?

Updated 1/23

I’ve never been a fan of sending huge summer speech therapy packets home with students, even when I was in a brick and mortar setting, unless they were requested by a parent. I figured if the parent was asking for work, there’s a fighting chance they will put the packet to good use. I am a fan of wrapping up a school year or intervention period with summarizing what was worked on during the period and giving a few ideas of how the student can continue to apply the skills over a break. The difference is that you’re not sending work for work’s sake. Rather, you are providing meaningful ideas for how the student can continue to enhance or extend their skills.

My criteria for goal-directed summer homework:

it takes into account the student’s level of performance on the skill. In other words, it’s not beyond their abilities. For example, I definitely don’t give articulation students a new sound to work on over the summer. It’s my job to teach the student how to make that sound, not the parent’s job.
it takes into account the student’s living situation. Does the student have parent support? If not, make it simple and something the student can easily accomplish.
it is meaningful to the student, not a huge packet that makes the SLP look good to their speech therapy supervisor but overwhelms the student and the parent.
it’s not a checklist that you use for every student. Chances are, that’s not meaningful to the student.
it ties in to a goal or objective the student worked on in therapy OR it addresses a skill that will help the student be able to be more successful with a skill or fully engage in school and therapy next fall.

Free Goal-directed Summer Homework Form

Goal-directed summer homework does not have to be time-consuming for the SLP. Grab your free goal-directed summer form here. Review it with the student during your last speech therapy or social skills session and then provide a copy to the student and/or parent.

See the completed example below!

goal-directed summer homework, speech therapy

before new social situations (water parks, vacations) generate expected and unexpected behaviors for the situation.
during your weekly phone call with grandma, ask her one question to maintain the conversation.
after you watch a video or movie with your sister, make 2 on topic comments to her about it.
Greet new people with (at least) brief eye contact and a verbal greeting.

Don’t forget these sources for summer speech therapy homework:

Boom cards. You can assign hyperplay links to your students. Students need to be assigned to a classroom and have a username and password to log in and play. Don’t use fastplay links-these expire after five days. Three easy steps to creating a hyperplay link: Go to your boom library and find the deck you want to assign. Click on the blue “action” box. Click on “hyperplay link” and follow it through.
Websites and youtube videos. Check out the playlists on my youtube channel for ideas of youtube videos to use. You might also find ideas for websites on this blog post about online sites for social skills therapy! This blog post on social skills homework might be helpful too!
Visuals, pages from an existing pdf that you worked on with the student. You might find this youtube video on how to extract a few pages from a pdf helpful.

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