Wild About Books Wednesday!

My therapy thrives on books! Literacy is one of my greatest passions in life and I find a million ways to incorporate it into my other passion - speech-language therapy! Each Wednesday, I'm going to highlight a favorite book and share my ideas for therapy. So, please join me over here at Speech is Sweet every Wednesday. I am wild about books.

First, if you haven't read Contextualized Language Intervention: Scaffolding PreK-12 Literacy Achievement by Teresa A. Ukrainetz put it on your to-read list ASAP! It's an easy read and saturated with great information and ideas. Read it by the pool this summer.

In a literature-based language intervention, Ukrainetz (2010) states, "The primary goal isn't to teach students how to read. Rather our goal is to improve the many aspects of language (vocabulary knowledge, grammar, narration, pragmatics, phonological awareness, etc)."

Every time I look at a book, I think about which aspects of language I can target. Recently, I designed a variety of activities for If You Give a Dog a Donut by Laura Numeroff. I fell in love with these If You Give a... books many moons ago lol.

You can find this Speech and Language Companion here.

I selected this book in particular because I currently have a student who is backing. It's an uncommon phonological process, but I usually have one student a year who does this. For any non-speechies out there, my student is replacing /d/ with /g/. So, "dear" would be produced as "gear."

So I created donut cards that target /d/ to make drilling a little more sweet. In addition, I used the final /d/ cards with students who are having difficulties with final consonants. Of course, these cards can also be used for a wide array of phonological awareness activities, not just for articulation & phonology.

I always get the most out of a book! Although one student inspired this selection, many other ideas came pouring out. Using one book for a variety of activities minimizes planning time and preparation. Work smarter, not harder.. right?!

I have two little kindergarteners who struggle with "I" so I created a pronoun game to use with them. When students draw a card with a pink donut they have to say, "I have a ___" and when they draw a blue donut they have to say, "You have a ___."

If You Give a Kid a Direction.... many of my students are working on following directions so I made a conditional direction game inspired by the book! I can say, students really enjoy following directions games that accompany funny books!

Inspired by the dog's treasure hunt, I made a pirate riddle game to use with my students who are struggling with labeling vocabulary after given a description.

In addition, I made some fun comprehension cards to go along with the book.

As an added bonus, our speech dog, Freddy looks an awful lot like the dog in the book! So we compared and contrasted the two dogs. Apparently, they both love donuts and apple juice! But Freddy has one brown ear and the dog from the book does not!

Have fun using books in therapy! 

~Scarlett