The Little Red Hen Goes to Speech!

It's Wild About Books Wednesday! And I'm wild about The Little Red Hen! She's my home girl.

One of my favorite books to use in therapy is The Little Red Hen Makes a Pizza by Philemon Sturges. In fact, I love this book so much I made a speech & language companion to accompany it. It's such a versatile book and most students come in with a morsel of background knowledge to build upon.

You can find this book companion here.

Comprehension. It's why we read. So of course this companion contains a comprehension game! Students draw comprehension cards, answer questions, and take turns using a pizza game board! This book lends itself so well to higher levels of thinking, so right-there to inferential questions are covered.

This is the perfect book for targeting directions. The Little Red Hen is cooking and we can stress to our students how important it is to be able to follow a recipe... or directions! This book companion features temporal directions:

I have so many students working on pronouns this year so I made a pizza pronoun card game! In addition to this game, it's so easy to focus on pronouns throughout the story. Engage students in discussions about the characters using pronouns. Here's a sneak peek of the pronoun cards:

Another topic that this book lends itself to is social skills! The Little Red Hen is a very good friend and well.... the duck, the dog, and the cat... not so much! The social skills activity features character cards that contain a friendly or unfriendly scenario. Students draw cards and discuss whether or not the characters are being a good friend.

Sequencing n' extra cheese! There are so many sequences to discuss in this book. You can discuss The Little Red Hen's sequence for buying a pizza pan or making pizza dough. Toppings cards feature an activity and students have to explain the sequence to complete the activity.

Lastly, the book companion features another delicious activity. Students are provided with an answer and must generate an appropriate question. For instance, if a student draws "delicatessen" they could ask, "where can you buy pepperoni?"

This book companion is just the tip of the iceberg! I still have an insane amount of ideas haha! For brevity's sake (well, I guess brevity has already been thrown out the window haha). I'll just share a couple bonus ideas.

One thing I always target with my older students is context clues! Chances are our language delayed students have no clue what a delicatessen is or even what a hardware store is. So my students and I scrutinize The Little Red Hen's wagon each time she leaves a different store to figure out what kind of store she visited. She leaves the hardware store with a pizza pan, nails, a sink, a broom, annnnnnd some other stuff! With a little scaffolding students are able to figure out that a Hardware Store sells household goods. Her wagon always contains lots of clues and it's a great vocabulary building exercise.

Lastly, comparing and contrasting! I always read an alternative version so students can compare the two stories. I would recommend The Little Red Hen by Barry Downard. It's the traditional story, but with hilarious photographs incorporated into the artwork. My students always crack up looking at the pictures.

Kickin' it old school with a blackboard, chalk, and a crooked venn diagram!

Do you use this book with your students? Do you use other versions of The Little Red Hen? Please share your ideas in the comments or ask for more ideas! Obviously, I can talk about this book all day, everyday! haha

*sips some chickweed tea*