Making Speech Pizzas! Practicing Sounds at Home
By: Ella Wild

During the Winter 2025 semester I had the wonderful opportunity to
complete an internship at The Therapy Spot for my undergraduate capstone at
Oakland University. I have learned so much and I am grateful to have this
experience as one of the first steps towards my journey of becoming a
Speech-Language Pathologist.
This project was tons of fun to create and I hope parents and children have
as much fun using it! This one is special because the idea to make pizzas actually
came from a client I observed! A friend was practicing his speech sounds by using
a green circle on the table for the sounds we wanted to hear and a red circle on the
table for the sounds we didn’t want to hear. He enjoyed this, however, he sparked a
new idea. He found the blue circle in the pile. Now, he had the colors of his favorite
PJ masks characters. He then decided he wanted to make “PJ masks pizzas” and
used the sound cards as pizza toppings. He was having so much fun making and
cooking the pizzas!
This session inspired me for a good idea to practice speech sounds at
home–making pizzas! Parents can make pretend pizzas with their child and use the
toppings to practice tricky sounds as they are placed onto the pizza.
First, decide which sounds you are going to practice. There is an example
sheet of common sounds that are often more challenging to produce. If you don’t
see specific sounds your child is working on–you can create words of your own! I’d
suggest practicing 10-15 words at a time. A good way to practice sounds is to find
them initially, medially, and finally. (/l/ example: initial = leap, medial = milk, final =
ball). You can also practice minimal pairs with 2 pizzas. Minimal pairs are two words
differing in meaning by only one phoneme, or sound. There are minimal pair
examples as well in the packet (ship/chip, marsh/march).

DOWNLOAD THE PRINTABLE PACKET TO TRY AT HOME!

There is a pizza base cutout within the packet along with cutout toppings.
Simply print and cut these out and you are almost ready to go! Then, you can write
down the words on a separate piece of paper, and allocate a topping to each word
(see example). As you place a topping on the pizza, model and practice the word
with your child. Pointing at your lip and mouth movements is helpful and sometimes
even adding a mirror!