Describe It - Object Description Cues and Picture Cards for Language Therapy

Working on Adjectives and Descriptions in Speech Pathology

Do you want to work on receptive and expressive vocabulary for preschool and school-age children? This printable, low-prep speech therapy resource is for you! You can also easily adapt it for telehealth.

Being able to use a variety of words is an important part of communication. It allows us to be specific and accurate in conveying our thoughts and intentions, and it helps us to understand and learn more from the world around us. Difficulty with vocabulary skills is very common for children with language disorders. Children with DLD often have find it difficult to learn new words and retain them. 

This product can be used in a variety of ways -- it's completely up to you! I deliberately made it open-ended and adaptable for real-world Speech Language Pathologists (Speech Pathologists, Speech Therapists or Speech and Language Therapists, depending on which country you live in!).

The first part of the resource is the A4, A5 or mini (4 per page) version of my describing scaffold. This scaffold is my prized possession, and I have been using some format of it for nearly a decade. Having a visual scaffold to support children's oral descriptions has been such an effective strategy to elicit text-level descriptions, as children are much more able to participate and demonstrate their skills with a degree of independence. I laminate the mini versions and keep them with my therapy games for convenience.

The second part of the resource is a set of picture cards that you can cut up and use for structured or play-based activities. There are 36 clear, playful illustrations of objects that can be used to explicitly target semantic and syntactic goals related to adjectives. You can also scaffold the child's oral (or written) understanding and use of descriptions. 

 As a bonus, this resource contains a brief summary of evidence regarding vocabulary instruction, as well as ideas for how to use the cue cards and picture cards. I have included three activity ideas as well. 

I hope you find this resource helpful. It's meant to be practical and easy to apply - get in touch if you have any questions or feedback for me.