Sentence Strips For Speech Therapy

What Sentence Strips Actually Are in Clinical Practice

Sentence strips are laminated cards or printed rows that display a visual representation of a target sentence, usually with word cards, pictures, or symbols that the clinician and client manipulate together during a session. They are a staple in AAC (augmentative and alternative communication) setups, early literacy interventions, and articulation work for younger kids. The basic idea is simple: place a visual sequence in front of the student, have them read, mimic, or build it, and repeat until the pattern sticks. The strips are typically organized around a specific speech or language goal. That could be a wh-question structure, a particular phoneme in context, a grammatical morpheme like past tense -ed, or a whole prosodic phrase for someone learning to use a speech-generating device. Some clinics buy them. Most just print them themselves using Word, Google Slides, or whatever template they already have sitting around.

Sentence Strips For Speech Therapy

Here is the part people skip when they first start using them. The strips themselves are the easy part. The hard part is knowing which strip to pull out, when to fade them, and what to do when the student figures out how to game the system. I learned that the hard way about three years into my practice. I had a seven-year-old with apraxia of speech working on carrier phrases. "I want the ___." Standard stuff. I printed a set of sentence strips with picture boards attached to the end, laminated them, and laid them out. First four sessions went fine. Then on session five he started pointing at every picture card and saying the same sound regardless of what the strip said. He had learned the motor plan for the target, but not the semantic mapping. He was just doing a rote sequence. I ended up stripping the pictures down to black-and-white outlines and replacing them with unfamiliar objects from our room — a tiny plastic shovel, a red cup, a crumpled sticky note. That forced him to actually process the word instead of riding the picture cue like a conveyor belt. Took six more weeks to get back to functional use, but at least he was producing the words now, not just the movements. So the takeaway is that visual supports can become crutches if you don't monitor for pattern recognition versus actual language processing. It happens faster than you think.

How to Build Your Own Sentence Strips Without Buying a $40 Pack

You do not need to order from SLP Stores or Amazon. I stopped doing that in 2019. Here is what I actually use. Open Google Slides. Set the slide size to 8.5 by 11 inches. Create a table with three columns and as many rows as you need. Each cell gets a target word or phrase. I use Arial Black at 36 point for the text, and I keep the cell background white with a light gray border so the lines don't compete with the words. Print on cardstock, run them through a laminator, and cut them apart with a paper trimmer. Takes about twenty minutes for a full set of thirty strips. If you need picture support, drag clip art from OpenClipArt or use your own photo library. Do not use Google Images unless you have verified the licensing, because some school districts audit that stuff and it makes paperwork worse than it needs to be. I keep a folder of photos I have taken myself of my therapy room objects. A photo of the actual red cup is better than a cartoon red cup for kids who are already working on generalization anyway.

When to Use Them and When Not To

Sentence strips work best for: They are not great for: This is where most programs fail. You introduce the strip, the student uses it for six weeks, and then you never fade it. The strip becomes a permanent crutch. The student cannot produce the sentence without looking at the card in front of them. That is not independence. That is dependency with a lamination.

The fade sequence I use is: Step one: full visual strip with text and pictures. This is where you start. Step two: remove the pictures, keep the text. The student reads the words but no longer has a dual-cue system.

Step three: remove half the words. Leave only the carrier phrase visible. The student fills in the variable words from memory or from a picture choice array off to the side. Step four: strip down to a single cue word. One keyword on the card. The rest is generated by the student. Step five: no strip. Prompt verbally or with a gesture. If the student cannot produce it without the visual, go back to step three and spend more time there before attempting to move forward again.

This whole progression usually takes eight to twelve weeks depending on the student's baseline. Do not rush it. I have seen therapists try to jump from step one to step four in two weeks and then wonder why the generalization failed in the classroom setting.

Common Mistakes That Waste Session Time

Making the strips too long. A single sentence spread across twelve words on one strip overwhelms most young clients and slows the repetition rate. Keep it to four to six words per strip. If the target sentence is longer, break it into two strips and link them with an arrow or a connector card. Using the same strip format for every goal. A strip for articulation should look different from a strip for grammar. Articulation strips need the target sound highlighted — I use a yellow background on the target word cell. Grammar strips need the inflectional morpheme marked, usually with a red border around the morpheme cell. Without that visual distinction the student treats every strip the same way and the modification goes unused. Not replacing the variable word cards often enough. I used to reuse the same set of picture cards for months. Kids notice. They start pointing to the corner of the card they recognize instead of processing the word. I rotate the variable cards every two weeks now. It costs five extra minutes of prep time and it keeps the novelty factor from decaying.

A Quick Note on Digital Alternatives

Some clinicians skip the physical strips entirely and use a tablet with a simple presentation app. This works fine for older students and for telehealth. The downside is that physical manipulation of the cards — picking them up, sliding them, stacking them — engages proprioceptive feedback that a touchscreen does not replicate. For motor speech disorders that rely on tactile-kinesthetic cues, the physical strip is still the better tool. For pure language goals with an older child, the digital route saves you about forty minutes of laminating and cutting per month. There is no single correct format. The strips are just a medium. What matters is the progression, the fading, and the willingness to pull them away before the student stops actually using the language and starts just reading the cards.