A free action-verb word list for speech therapy
· 4 min read
Action verbs are some of the most useful early targets in speech and language therapy. They show up constantly in everyday life, they are easy to picture with a real photo, and they bridge naturally into grammar work (present progressive, past tense) and into articulation practice once you sort them by sound.
Below is a starter list of high-frequency, therapy-relevant action verbs, grouped two ways: by everyday theme (handy for building a deck around a child's interests or routines) and by initial target sound (handy when a verb deck doubles as articulation practice). Use it however helps — copy it into your planning doc, or build the matching decks in SpeechDeck.
Action verbs by theme
Daily routines
eating, drinking, sleeping, washing, brushing, dressing, waking, cooking, cleaning, pouring
Playground & play
running, jumping, climbing, sliding, swinging, throwing, catching, kicking, hiding, building
Kitchen & home
cutting, stirring, mixing, baking, opening, closing, wiping, sweeping, folding, watering
Movement
walking, hopping, skipping, crawling, dancing, spinning, falling, pushing, pulling, carrying
Self-care & feelings
smiling, laughing, crying, hugging, waving, clapping, sharing, helping, resting, reading
Action verbs by initial sound
Sorting the same verbs by their first sound lets one library serve articulation goals too. A few examples to get you started:
- /p/ — pour, push, pull, paint, play, point
- /b/ — bake, build, brush, bounce, blow
- /k/ — cut, catch, climb, carry, color, cook
- /s/ — sit, sleep, sing, swim, slide, sweep
- /r/ — run, read, reach, ride, rest
- /l/ — look, laugh, lift, listen, lock
Turning a word list into a session
A list is a starting point; the work is in how you present it. A few things that make verb targets land:
- Use real photographs, not clip art. Real images generalize to the real world far better for receptive and expressive language work.
- Keep the photo, the word, and the audio matched. If the picture shows one action while the audio says another, you are teaching the wrong association — the one thing a verb deck must never do.
- Decide your reveal. Picture-only for expressive targets; word-and-picture or identification (tap the matching photo) for receptive ones.
- Log as you go. Scoring each response Correct, Incorrect, or Cued in the moment is far more accurate than reconstructing it afterward — and it is what your progress notes are built from.
The fast version
SpeechDeck ships these themes as ready-made decks of real-photo action verbs, each with correctly matched native-speaker audio, and lets you build your own from any subset — filtered by theme, target sound, or syllable count. Score responses in one tap and export a session straight into your IEP notes.