Long E /i/ task cards to pair with fun activities for students with very low intellegibility. This is your go-to task card resource for increasing to CV, VC, CVC, and CCVC syllable shapes, improving lip retraction, and maintaining jaw stability in order to improve articulation in speech therapy.

This resource was created in order to help Speech Language Pathologists long E words in children with very limited speech intelligibility. It was also created for children with imprecise articulation due to limited lip retraction.

Vowels are the unsung heroes of speech, providing great articulatory clues for our students with very limited speech production. Long E is a great place to start when targeting vowels, as the appearance of the vowel production is visible for students. /i/ is also a great place to start tackling jaw grading in speech therapy.

Focusing on vowel sounds in speech therapy is often overlooked, however doing so can significantly enhance intelligibility. Vowels play a crucial role in shaping the overall clarity and comprehensibility of speech. By refining vowel articulation, speech pathologists can make substantial strides in improving a client’s ability to be understood, ultimately contributing to more effective communication.

Lip retraction holds significance in articulation as it influences the precise formation of certain sounds, enhancing speech clarity. This is one aspect of speech production that is often overlooked. As Speech Language Pathologists, we’ve been mostly trained to judge the sounds our students produced. Was that word a little off? Was there something not quite right that you can’t put your finger on? Look again at your students’ speech production. Observe how their articulators actually move when producing that sound, and determine if that was the most efficient and effective way to produce that sound. We might have a little more work to do!

For children with extremely limited sound production , targeting vowels can be the key towards improving intelligibility. This should be done during child-led play. These task cards can be used as a guide for the clinician to focus on words containing /i/ or used as visual reminders for the child to understand the word that is being worked on.

This resource includes 63 engaging task cards created to help elicit lip retraction in speech therapy. These task cards can be used in a variety of activities. They include high frequency words that children actually use, promoting increased generalization of skills. They can be used along with a prompt that works best for that individual child. These can can be treated as task cards for drilling, or simply a guide for clinicians for target selection. It includes the following pictured task cards containing Long E /i/:

• 10 CV (e.g., me, see, he) + 1 CCV (tree)
• 4 VC (e.g., eat, each)
• 39 CVC (e.g., need, seat)
• 3 CCVC (e.g., green, please) + 1 CCCVC (squeeze)
• 4 CV with /ir/ (e.g., hear, near)

If you haven't yet, look into the great Pam Marshalla's work. It was a huge eye opener for me to start targeting vowels!