picture description task speech therapy adults

How to Use Picture Scenes in Speech Therapy (+ free scenes)

• allisonfors
• December 15, 2022
• Pinterest Boards , Speech Resources , Therapy Ideas

Picture scenes are a versatile and engaging tool to use in speech therapy to work on many expressive and receptive language goals. Including grammar, wh questions, following directions, inferences, conversations, and much more!

I am all for activities that target multiple goals – and these are no exception! Picture scenes decrease planning time because of the many goals you can target. Their versatility also makes them great for mixed group therapy. Even better, I have a Pinterest board with over 150 FREE PICTURE SCENES ready for you to use – no printing necessary!

Feel free to pull this web page up in your session to work on any of the skills listed below. These are images from the internet that I have saved on one webpage (pictured below.) You will need a Pinterest account and you can click on any picture scene to make it bigger and use it in your session. These scenes are busy, so I don’t recommend using them to teach the beginning stages of concepts or for those students who get distracted or overwhelmed easily with visuals.

SPEECH THERAPY LANGUAGE TARGETS

Conversations.

I love to use these scenes to work on conversational turn-taking or initiating conversations. They are silly enough to pique interest and work on these skills before moving to a less structured approach. Present your student (or let them choose) a  picture and have them start a conversation based on it. You may also see how many times you, or 2 students, can go back and forth with questions/comments about the picture.

Many of these scenes have a theme – camping, at school, swimming, at the park, etc. Use these themes to teach vocabulary and discuss associations, categories, and negation. Why do you take a tent camping? Which doesn’t belong?

Most of these scenes are packed with people doing things. This makes them perfect to talk verbs – present, past, or present progressive. I like to use these scenes as a generalization tool for this instead of the beginning stages of teaching verbs. Use the scenes to point to a character and ask: What is she doing? What did he do?

WH QUESTIONS

Use the scenes to work on answering various questions correctly: Who is that? What is that? Why is he crying? Where is the dog? When do you go swimming? It’s easy to come up with different types of WH questions to ask with the variety of scenes and many things happening in each one.

SENTENCE FORMULATION

Have your students work on sentence formulation with an engaging scene of their choice. Ask them to describe something they see. If needed, prompt your student with a more specific question, such as: Tell me what the boy did . Use a sentence scaffold to focus the sentences on including something specific, for example, pronouns or past tense verbs. (eg. He/she + is + -ing.)

FOLLOWING DIRECTIONS

Give simple 1-step directions or complex multi-step directions! For example, “Point to the chair” or “Touch the girl with brown hair, then find the boy sleeping, and last point to the red car.”

These fun scenes are great for making inferences. Why are the kids wearing gloves outside? Why are the kids laughing on the playground? Why is he crying?

NOUNS & PRONOUNS

Since these pictures are packed with people, it’s easy to work on nouns (boy, girl) and pronouns (he, she, they, his, hers, theirs). Ask: Who is that? Who is running? Whose car is it? 

PREPOSITIONS

Discuss where the scenes are: outside, inside, at the park. You may also test generalization skills of various prepositions: in, on, under, near, far, between, in front, between, above, below, or prepositional phrases.

LANGUAGE PICTURE SCENES

I began creating my own scenes because of how integral scenes have become in my therapy. In these resources, I include supplemental activities of task cards, WH questions to ask, and sample directions to give your students.

Download a free birthday party picture scene with pre-made WH questions and 1-3 step directions.

FREE BIRTHDAY PARTY LANGUAGE SCENE

BARRIER GAMES PICTURES SCENES

Another way I use scenes to target many language and articulation goals is through barrier games! Read about what they are and how to use them – and grab a free one in this post! Why You Should Be Using Barrier Games in Speech Therapy

Have you ever utilized picture scenes in therapy? What other skills would you target?

Y ou may also be interested in these Pinterest boards:

• How to Use Short Videos in Speech Therapy
• How to Use Blank Comics in Speech Therapy

Interested in more speech and language activity ideas, plus access to the freebie library!? Sign up below!

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7 Responses

i wish somebody did picture scenes to target articulation. a scene loaded with words with the target phoneme at Initial, medial and final postions. i find it very hard to work at sentence level with kindergarteners. they cant generate sentences

I created these articulation scenes for later sounds! https://allisonfors.com/shop/articulation-barrier-games-speech-therapy/

https://integratedtreatmentservices.co.uk/?resource=p-sound-loaded-scene

Dear Allison, Thank you for this post. And for the blog which I have just found out about. Actually, I am neither a speech therapist nor a parent, only a humble teacher of English as a foreign language but since I work mostly with pre-schoolers and primary, I am always on the lookout for new ways of maximising production in kids. It is a real relevation that there is so much that I can learn from the techqniues and approaches that you are sharing and adapt them to second or foreign language teaching and learning. Simply: Wow! I have found one of the ‘silly picture scenes’ and your post only today, so there is no real classroom experience to be shared, not yet, anyway, but I am pretty excited about trialling and testing them with my students soon.

Thank you once more! Happy New Year!

Good info however, I went to the pinterest board and none of them are free, am I missing something? Where are the 100 free scenes?

Hi! Scroll down a bit more. They are there at the bottom! I do need to clean up that board a bit so it’s a bit less confusing.

Nice explanation about speech therapy. Really worthful.

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Describe the picture

Description

Exercise helps people with cognitive, speech, or language disorders with generating and speaking sentences based on the picture they see.

Helps improve: Speaking, Sentence Planning, Spontaneous Speech, Word Retrieval

#of difficulty levels: 1

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Clinical evidence

• Caplan, D., & Hanna, J. (1998). Sentence Production by Aphasic Patients in a Constrained Task. Brain and Language, 184-218. • Des Roches, C., Balachandran, I., Ascenso, E., Tripodis, Y., & Kiran, S. (2015). Effectiveness of an impairment-based individualized rehabilitation program using an iPad-based software platform. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.01015.

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Picture description tasks:, mini illustrations – no booklet included, price: £12.42 inc vat .

Materials: High Quality Paper, gloss finish

12 High quality Illustrations (smaller than A5) used as picture description tasks for adults and children with language difficulties, specifically targeted at the South-Asian community

What is included? This resource pack contains 12 illustrations of culturally and religiously diverse festivals and scenarios.  Diwali,  Raksha Bandhan  Holi  Karvachauth  Vaisakhi  Eid  Mandir/temple  Gurdwara  Grocery shopping  Home scene  Bus stop  Tailor

NOTE: This is a sample pack of the full version that is also available on our shop as a digital download that contains all 17 illustrations with the research paper and crib sheet.

Who can it be used for?

This resource can be used for a range of ages – from young children to adults who have experience communication difficulties. People who have suffered from brain injury, Stroke, dementia, and much more. These resources target conditions such as:  Aphasia  Apraxia of speech  Dysarthria  Cognitive communication difficulties

What does it target? – Vocabulary – Verbs – Nouns/Pronouns – Prepositions – Adjectives – Sentence formation – WH-Questioning – Following directions – Narrations – Conversations – Attention and memory – Inference, reasoning, and problem-solving – Speech intelligibility and fluency

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