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Thoughtful Talk LLC I'm Tricia - a junior high SLP and author/seller on Teachers Pay Teachers. As a junior high SLP, it

Apparently October 13th is National M&M Day… and now I have an excuse to eat chocolate. 😂🍫I went down a little M&M's tri...
10/13/2026

Apparently October 13th is National M&M Day… and now I have an excuse to eat chocolate. 😂🍫

I went down a little M&M's trivia rabbit hole and learned a few things I definitely didn't know. Like the fact that red M&M's disappeared for almost a decade?!

And because I can turn just about anything into a speech therapy activity, I also have a Chocolate Candy Taste Test in the Thoughtful Talk library.

It's a fun way to work on describing, comparing, expressing opinions, and explaining *why* you prefer one thing over another.

Plus, I don't think I've ever had a student complain about a lesson involving chocolate. 😂

Okay, important question: Peanut or plain M&M's?👇

Boom Blast Stix: 10/10 for communication opportunities. 0/10 for my nervous system.I swear this game makes my heart race...
10/12/2026

Boom Blast Stix: 10/10 for communication opportunities. 0/10 for my nervous system.

I swear this game makes my heart race every single time because I KNOW it's going to explode… I just don't know WHEN.

But the communication opportunities? SO good. 👏

We used it in our secondary social communication group, and it naturally created opportunities for:

💬 Collaborating and sharing ideas
🤝 Taking turns and negotiating
🧠 Problem-solving and flexible thinking
👀 Reading the room and responding to peers
🗣️ Explaining strategies and making group decisions

And the best part? The students were so focused on keeping the whole thing from exploding that the communication happened naturally.

Sometimes the best social communication activities aren't complicated lessons. They're games that give students a reason to actually talk to each other.

Even if they take a few years off their SLP's life in the process. 😂

Fellow SLPs — does anyone else have a love/hate relationship with this game?!

Another week of secondary speech therapy where we were just about everywhere except the speech room. 😂Here's what we wer...
10/12/2026

Another week of secondary speech therapy where we were just about everywhere except the speech room. 😂

Here's what we were up to this week:

☕ Community outings: Our life skills students headed to a breakfast café, where we practiced calling to make a reservation, ordering, and social communication. We also took a trip to Target for a Halloween scavenger hunt!

💥 Social communication: We played Boom Blast Sticks, where students had to work together to stack the pieces without the whole thing exploding. 😂 We also squeezed in some homecoming trivia on Baamboozle since it was homecoming week!

👂 Language groups:We focused on active listening and the barriers that can get in the way. This lesson came straight from my Thoughtful Talk library!

👻 Instructional Art: We made blow ghost art using paint, straws, and googly eyes. Such a fun way to incorporate functional communication into an art activity! I'm planning to add this one to Thoughtful Talk soon. 🤍

Weeks like this are exactly why I love secondary speech therapy. One day we're working on communication in a restaurant, the next we're problem-solving with peers, and somewhere in between we're blowing paint around with straws. 😂

Different settings. Different needs. Meaningful communication everywhere.

Secondary SLPs — which activity would your students love most? 👇

Turns out… you can target a LOT of speech + language skills with a coffee shop. ☕😂I wanted this lesson to go beyond prac...
10/02/2026

Turns out… you can target a LOT of speech + language skills with a coffee shop. ☕😂

I wanted this lesson to go beyond practicing “Can I have a coffee?”

Because actually navigating a coffee shop involves so much more — deciding what you want, understanding unfamiliar menu words, communicating an order, answering questions, asking for clarification when you don’t understand, and repairing communication breakdowns.

And then flip it around and put the student behind the counter. 👀

Now we’re working on listening for details, following directions, reading order tickets, asking when information is missing, communicating with customers + vocational language.

So I built both sides into this Coffee Day lesson. ☕

One real-world situation. Three levels. A whole lot of functional communication.
And because it’s Thoughtful Talk, there’s more than the coffee shop activity — warm-ups, mini lessons, reading + comprehension, vocabulary, Mad Libs, reflection, and leveled supports from AAC/Foundational through Expanding.

PDF + Google Slides included. 🤍

Available now in the Thoughtful Talk lesson library.

Secondary SLPs — are you putting your students on the customer side or worker side first? 😂👇

Okay, apparently you all wanted the details on the Notecard Tower 😂 so here you go!I used this with our Social Communica...
09/29/2026

Okay, apparently you all wanted the details on the Notecard Tower 😂 so here you go!
I used this with our Social Communication groups this week and it was SO simple.
Students worked in teams of 2–3 and had 5 minutes to find as many things as they had in common as possible. Every commonality they discovered had to be written on its own notecard.

When the timer went off, we took away every blank card. 👀

Then came round two: another 5 minutes to use ONLY the cards they earned to build the tallest freestanding tower.

And yes... they were competing against the other group. 😂

What I love about activities like this is that the task itself is simple, but there are so many opportunities for social communication naturally built in — initiating, asking questions, listening, finding common interests, sharing ideas, negotiating, problem solving, collaborating... all without sitting there talking about social skills.

And because several of you asked where this activity came from: Notecard Tower + more activities like it are included in my Collaborate & Communicate: Activities for Social Communication resource in my TPT store. 🤍

But even if you don't have the resource — grab some notecards and steal this idea for your group next week. 🙌

another week of secondary speech where approximately 2% of it happened at an actual speech table 😂This week:💬 Social com...
09/21/2026

another week of secondary speech where approximately 2% of it happened at an actual speech table 😂

This week:

💬 Social communication groups completed getting-to-know-you interviews... and then we abandoned my Venn diagram plan for Whoonu because sometimes you read the room and pivot.

🌮 Individual students completed the Queso Personality Quiz + worked on functional following directions using calendars.

🏀 In Instructional Art, we continued making basketball hoops to connect with our students' school assembly basketball game.

☕ I supported students while they worked in our school coffee shop.

🛍️ And we took communication into the community with a Five Below outing, where students explored things they can work toward earning through their school jobs.

This is one of the reasons I love sharing these weekly recaps. Secondary speech therapy can happen at a table—but it can also happen in Art, at work, in a store, or in the middle of an activity that already matters to the student.

Functional communication happens everywhere. 🤍

Secondary SLPs: what did therapy look like for you this week?

100+ SLPs. 🥹🤍When I started building Thoughtful Talk, I was really just trying to create what I needed as a secondary SL...
09/17/2026

100+ SLPs. 🥹🤍

When I started building Thoughtful Talk, I was really just trying to create what I needed as a secondary SLP - age-appropriate resources that could work across the very different students sitting in front of me without spending my nights creating three versions of everything.

And apparently, I wasn't the only one who needed that.

There are now 100+ active SLPs using Thoughtful Talk in their own therapy rooms, and I still can't quite believe I get to say that.

Every subscription, message, shared post, and “I used this today!” means more to me than you probably realize. This little idea has grown into something that other SLPs are actually opening up and using with their students every day. That's pretty freaking cool. 🥹

If you're already a Thoughtful Talk member, tell me what you've been loving lately! A favorite lesson, activity, or even how you're using the resources with your caseload. I genuinely want to know. ↓

And if you're one of the 100+ thank you. 🤍

another week of “wait... that counts as speech therapy?” 😂This week was a little bit of everything.🐱 My social communica...
09/08/2026

another week of “wait... that counts as speech therapy?” 😂

This week was a little bit of everything.

🐱 My social communication groups created logos for our new C.A.T. — Communication, Action + Tools group slogan.

🎲 Small groups played Whoonu (such an easy way to get students talking, listening + learning about each other).

🙋 Individual sessions involved academic support + lots of real-life self-advocacy.

🎨 In Life Skills Art, we broke out the watercolors + straws.

📢 And in FACS, we continued working on voice levels—moving from last week's whispering to recognizing when we're speaking too loudly for the environment.

One of my favorite things about sharing these is showing how different secondary speech therapy can look depending on the student, classroom + moment.

Same SLP. Very different therapy. 🤍

What do you want to see more of from these weekly recaps—the actual materials, how I target goals within the activities, or both?

08/30/2026

Secondary SLPs always ask what I actually do in therapy… so here’s a peek at what I taught this week 👀

Social communication, voice levels, active listening + individual sessions — all in one week. 😅

Should I make this a weekly series? MiddleSchoolSLP SpeechLanguagePathologist SLPLife

Yesterday I shared the scheduling process I use every August, and it reminded me how many of us are staring at spreadshe...
08/14/2026

Yesterday I shared the scheduling process I use every August, and it reminded me how many of us are staring at spreadsheets right now. 😅

So I decided to put everything I use into one place.

🎁 My Secondary SLP Scheduling Workbook is completely free.

Inside you'll find:

✨ Caseload mapping pages
✨ Push-in planning sheets
✨ Study hall grouping tools
✨ Weekly scheduling templates
✨ A scheduling checklist

If it helps make your August even a little less chaotic, then it's done its job.

Grab your free copy at the link in my bio. 🤍

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Scottsdale, AZ
85250–85271

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