Articulation Stories for Young Readers

Reading passages for articulation are one of the most efficient tools in your speech therapy room. Think about it:

1. They help students bridge the gap between sentences and conversation skills
2. They help students improve their reading abilities
3. They are versatile and easy to incorporate into mixed groups

But do you know what is even better than a generic reading passage? One that has been created explicitly for articulation students, by an SLP!

I created my original articulation reading passages for later developing sounds a few years ago and they have been the best seller in my store ever since. They are amazing for older students who are strong readers who are working on later developing sounds.

But there has been one problem. They aren’t great for younger students or early readers.

This stumped me for a long time. How could I create articulation reading passages for students who are not strong readers? After all, the needs of a kindergarten or 1^st grade student are vastly different than those of a 5^th or 6^th grade student.

Finally, after a year of reading kindergarten level texts with my daughter, I figured out how to make the best articulation stories for young readers.

Here is how these articulation reading passages for early readers work:

1. The stories are short and easy to read. Most of the words in each story are composed of CVC, CVCe, sight words, or words that are easy to sound out.
2. Even though the stories are short, they are still loaded with early developing articulation sounds.
3. The activities are scaffolded. This is to improve confidence for early readers.
   1. The clinician or parent reads the story while the student listens for their articulation sounds
   1. The student practices saying the words
   1. They student reads the story
   1. The student answers comprehension questions about the passage
4. There are 5 articulation reading passages for each of the early developing phonemes, for a total of 45 articulation stories
   • /k/
   • /g/
   • /t/
   • /d/
   • /f/
   • /v/
   • /p/
   • /b/
   • /n/ and /m/ combined

As you can see, these articulation reading passages were specifically created with young readers in mind. Each student has the opportunity to practice their reading skills while they practice their articulation skills. If that isn’t efficient, I don’t know what is.

If you would like to try out some free articulation reading passages, be sure and hop over to the free resource library so you can see what all the hype is about!