Welcome to Elevate Essentials!
This is your go-to spot for news and information on everything you need inside of SLP Elevate, updated throughout the month to keep you in the know! Come here anytime to stay up to date on what’s new - whether it’s the latest bonus resources, upcoming PD sessions, or key updates for Elevate members. Think of this page as your one-stop space to keep you connected, organized, and in the loop.
🌸 April Favorites & Seasonal Must-Haves 🌸
April brings a mix of spring energy, busy schedules, and students who are definitely feeling the stretch toward the end of the year. This is a great time to lean into engaging, relevant topics while keeping sessions structured and purposeful.
Start on your My Resources page with these Monthly Theme Units:
Spring Forward: Fashion & Fun
This theme continues to be a great fit for April with topics like spring fashion, thrifting, prom, spring sports, and seasonal trends. It’s perfect for targeting inferencing, vocabulary, social communication, perspective-taking, and real-world discussion - all while tapping into what students are already talking about.
Weird Plants & Insects
As we move into prime growing season, this unit becomes even more relevant. With plants blooming and bugs reappearing, students can build background knowledge while working on reading comprehension, vocabulary, describing, comparing, and inferencing. It’s surprisingly high-interest, seasonal, and easy to plug into sessions.
Sleep
This time of year, many students start to drag - and this unit meets them right where they are. Use it to spark conversations about routines, self-care, and healthy habits while targeting comprehension, problem-solving, perspective-taking, and real-world life skills that students can actually apply.
Then don’t forget to check the Bonus Page for timely resources that fit April perfectly:
🎭 April Fools’ Day Resource
Located in the Holidays section, this resource includes a nonfiction passage with vocabulary, main idea activities, inferential questions, inferencing sort, and more. It’s a fun, seasonal way to target comprehension, vocabulary, and higher-level thinking while leaning into April Fools’ Day.
🌎 Earth Day Articulation Word Search
Also located in the Holidays section, this Earth Day-themed articulation activity targets K, SH, TH, L, R, and S sounds. It’s an easy, low-prep way to incorporate seasonal content while still hitting speech sound goals.
💼 Life Skills: Summer Jobs & Interview Questions
As students begin thinking about summer plans, this resource is a perfect real-world fit. Located in the Life Skills Bonus section, it helps students explore job options, practice problem-solving, and build communication skills. Use job cards for discussion and reflection, or practice interview questions through role-play to strengthen expressive language and social communication.
These April resources help keep sessions seasonal, relevant, and engaging - while still supporting meaningful skill-building as the school year continues. A little spring energy + practical life skills = a great April combo. 💜
👀 SLP Elevate Summer Camp… might be our best one yet 👀
Okay we weren’t going to say anything just yet… but we’re too excited not to drop a little hint.
If you’ve ever wondered:
✨ “Is Elevate worth keeping over the summer?”
✨ “Will I actually use anything while I’m off?”
✨ “How can I go into next year feeling MORE prepared (without doing a ton of work right now)?”
…we’ve got you. 💜
This summer inside Elevate is going to be all about:
🌴 Recharging (because you deserve it)
💡 Getting inspired (without overwhelm)
🤝 Staying connected with other middle/high school SLPs
🎯 And actually feeling ready for back-to-school season
We’re talking things like:
📚 A super chill, actually-fun book club
🎓 Summer PD (yes, CEUs included. Think Ethics, DEI, Supervision… 👀)
🔥 A few live sessions you’re definitely not going to want to miss
🎉 And something new this year that may or may not involve prizes…
We’ll share all the details soon - but just know:
👉 You’re going to want to be here for this.
Stay tuned… ⛺✨
✨ A little reminder about the SLP Elevate Referral Program…
Sharing SLP Elevate with a colleague just got even more fun… and more rewarding. 💜
Here’s the new lineup:
1 referral → $10 Starbucks gift card ☕
2 referrals → Speech Time Fun merch 📔
3 referrals → FREE ticket to a Speech Time Fun Speech Retreat Virtual Conference (ASHA CEUs!) 🎉
4+ referrals → FREE month of SLP Elevate 💻
Know a CF who needs support? A coworker who wants better materials? A fellow SLP who would love this community? Send them our way! When they list your name on the onboarding survey, you get the credit - and the perks.
There’s no limit, so refer away. We’re so grateful for every recommendation and connection you help create.
🎉 April 2026 - Weird World Records 🌎✨
Get ready for the weird, the wild, and the “wait… that’s a real record?!” moments. This month’s Weird World Records theme taps into curiosity and surprise to spark engagement while targeting meaningful language goals. Once on the monthly theme unit page, start by watching the short video tutorial to see how everything fits together, then head to the downloads section to grab the full ZIP file or choose individual PDFs based on your students’ needs.
This unit is packed with high-interest activities designed to keep students motivated while building real skills. You’ll find Reading Passages & Activities, Building Background Knowledge, and Picture Stories & Activities that introduce strange-but-true records and encourage discussion, comprehension, and vocabulary growth. Word of the Week and YouTube Cheat Sheets help support understanding while giving students structured ways to connect new information to what they already know.
Looking for interactive skill-building? Color by Main Idea, Decode & Deliver Following Directions, and Summarizing Stories provide hands-on ways to target organization, listening, and comprehension. Inferring Emails and Figurative Language Instagram Posts bring in real-world style tasks that encourage students to read between the lines, interpret meaning, and explain their thinking.
You’ll also find functional, real-life connections with Functional Life Skills Scenes & Activities, plus AAC Trying Something Big for supported communication opportunities. Need articulation support? The Articulation Word Search makes sound practice easy to incorporate. And for more video-based learning, the Mystery Doug Video Companion adds another way to build background knowledge and spark curiosity.
It’s a fun, surprising, and skill-packed lineup that keeps students thinking, talking, and asking questions, as sometimes the weirdest facts keep our students the most engaged.
AAC: Trying Something Big
Supports AAC users in communicating effort, difficulty, persistence, and when to stop during tasks using simple, functional language. This resource includes visual sentence supports and modeling opportunities that can be used during games, movement activities, or academic work in both individual and group sessions.
Simple to Strong Sentences
Helps students expand basic sentences into more detailed, complete ideas using a step-by-step scaffold and visual supports. Students build from simple to stronger sentences by adding who, what, where, and extra details using worksheets, sentence strips, and guided prompts.
Decode & Deliver: Following Directions
Targets following directions through engaging activities like Direction Quests, task cards, and “Decode the DMs” text message challenges. Students practice interpreting, giving, and completing multi-step directions using structured worksheets, anchor charts, and real-world school scenarios.
✨ New March Bonuses Are Here!
March brings fresh opportunities for conversation, engagement, and skill-building—and this month’s bonus resources are designed to give you flexible tools that work across articulation, language, and AAC support. Whether you're adding some humor to your sessions, strengthening memory and comprehension, or building foundational communication skills, these resources are ready to plug right into your therapy plans.
AAC Foundations
Support students who use AAC with this hands-on resource designed to build functional communication using both core and fringe vocabulary. With core boards, sentence strips, chat mats, and interactive pieces, students can practice requesting, commenting, and asking questions while building longer, more meaningful sentences.
(Located in the AAC section of the Bonus page.)
Jokes for Articulation
Add some laughter to articulation practice with a collection of student-friendly jokes targeting later-developing sounds like /s/, /z/, /th/, /sh/, /r/, /l/, and /ch/. These are perfect for quick warm-ups, carryover practice, or motivating students who need a little extra fun to stay engaged while practicing their target sounds. (Located in the Articulation section of the Bonus page.)
Memory Card Games: International Women’s Day
This interactive memory game highlights influential women through short mini bios while targeting working memory, recall, and expressive language. Students practice using memory strategies to study and recall key details, then confirm their understanding with “Who Am I?” and picture cards. It’s a great way to blend meaningful content with comprehension, retelling, and discussion skills.
(Located in the Holidays section of the Bonus page.)
💡 All three March bonuses are ready to use now and designed to support a variety of therapy goals—from articulation and memory to AAC communication and language development. Keep an eye out for even more bonus resources dropping later this month!
AAC Foundations
Bonuses → AAC
Jokes for Articulation
Bonuses → Articulation
Memory Card Games: International Women’s Day
Bonuses → Holidays
Up Next in SLP Elevate...
The coming few months are packed with exciting theme units that bring fresh ideas and student-approved fun. From new stories to ready to go activities, we’ve got tools that make therapy planning easier and sessions more memorable. Stay tuned - you won’t want to miss these!
May 2026
June 2026
July 2026
There’s always something exciting on the horizon! While we don’t have any live sessions scheduled right now, we’re getting ready to announce SLP Elevate Summer Camp - and it’s going to be packed with great professional development opportunities and ASHA CEUs. 👀 Stay tuned… you won’t want to miss what’s coming!
We’re also gearing up for our July Speech Retreat and already dreaming up this fall’s Speech Retreat, so you can look forward to even more ways to connect, learn, and recharge.
In the meantime, don’t forget that your PD Hub is full of on-demand sessions you can watch anytime for PDH/CMH - perfect for learning at your own pace whenever it fits your schedule.
322: From SLP to CEO
321: How the 3:1 Model Supports School-Based SLP Burnout
320: Advocating Without Burning Out
319: The "So What?" Test for Writing Functional Goals
318: SLP Role with Public Speaking
317: You're Not a Data Robot: Collect Less, Teach More, and Still Show Progress
From Hallie's Desk -
Hey Elevate Friends,
April is here… and between spring finally showing up, schedules getting a little wild, and students bringing some very interesting energy into sessions, it felt like the perfect time to lean into something equally unexpected:
Weird World Records.
Because let’s be real - nothing hooks attention faster than “the tallest ___,” “the fastest ___,” or “wait… someone actually did that?!”
This month’s theme is packed with those moments that make students stop, laugh, question everything, and then want to talk about it. And that’s exactly where the magic happens.
Weird facts and record-breaking moments naturally open the door for describing, comparing, inferencing, predicting, and asking questions. They spark curiosity, which means more engagement, better conversations, and way less pulling teeth to get responses.
(We love a low-effort, high-impact situation.)
And if April starts to feel a little unpredictable - some days super productive, other days a bit… chaotic - that’s okay too. You’re not meant to have perfectly polished sessions right now. You’re meant to meet your students where they are, lean into what grabs their attention, and keep things moving forward in a way that works.
Progress doesn’t always look neat. Sometimes it looks like laughing over a bizarre world record and turning that moment into meaningful language practice.
And that counts. It really does.
So this month, embrace the weird, follow the curiosity, and don’t be afraid to let sessions get a little unexpected (in the best way).
Because sometimes the most memorable learning happens when no one sees it coming.
Cheering you on through all the fun and randomness,
Hallie 💜