Books and play are my two favorite
therapy methods, so what could be better than combining the two? Sometimes
people think that all SLPs do is play, so how hard could that be? They’d be
surprised if they tried to accomplish specific goals in maybe an hour or so a
week!
5 benefits to combining books and play
in therapy:
Kids
who are engaged are more willing to learn
Using
play and the language for play also helps improve their symbolic thinking
skills.
Using
adapted books helps them understand and engage with books, improving their
literacy skills.
Using
therapy methods and materials that are part of their environment helps to
promote generalization, or carry-over.
They are both so much fun!
Spring is a fun time for incorporating a
cloud/rain theme to go along with the saying, “April showers bring May
flowers.” My favorite book to use for that theme? It Looked Like Spilt Milk by
Charles G. Shaw.
Adapting the book
Did you know that there is a great
website from the Baltimore City School system that has Boardmaker
symbols for books all ready to download? For FREE! What a huge timesaver if you
have Boardmaker
already installed!
Get the list of all of the adapted books
here. Or you can start with the downloadable zip files, starting with the
letter A here.
Unfortunately, It looked like Spilt Milk
used to be available, but no longer is. Maybe I should make that freebie for my
newsletter members- what do you think?
Games & Skills
Since VISUAL DISCRIMINATION SKILLS are a
must for any students using a symbol system to communicate, the shape matching
nature of this book makes it a great choice to use with students who are
developing literacy skills. Additional shape matching activities can be found
in the book companion at my store.
You know that I loved using Ellison
cutters when I was in the schools (free), and now many people are buying home
versions like Sizzix or Cricut
machines. (expensive)
No worries, though, as you can just
download the cloud shapes here and do some old fashioned tracing and cutting
on construction paper instead.
Cloud faces with the basic
EMOTIONS are
always cute to use!
Make a pile face down, elicit a target
from your student and then let them choose from the pile. If you have 4
emotions, you can have 4 winners!
Instead of picking randomly from a pile,
stack each emotion in a deck and students can take turns requesting the emotion
card they want.
Clouds with different colors, sizes and
shapes add DESCRIPTIVE
WORDS to
their language!
Mixed groups?
Try using tape or fun-tak to
attach other pictures to the back of the cloud shapes. In the picture, I have
pieces to a Sesame Street puzzle attached to use as a puzzle token board. The
student knew that when the puzzle was completed, the task was done.
Give each student a set of their own
clouds with their specific targets. Place the free cloud page that you
downloaded in a page protector so students have to cover all of the shapes.
SPEECH SKILLS- Tape
pictures with the target sounds on the back or write the word using a dry erase
marker on the clouds if they are laminated. Easy!
LANGUAGE SKILLS- It
doesn’t have to be fancy. Just cut out the pictures from a worksheet that you
can give for homework and tape them on the back to practice first!
There are so many more fun activities in my
book companion. Besides
giving little ones an easy way to start using the strategy of looking back in
the text to recall story details, there’s a cute open ended game board, and
rhyming and phonology activities, too.
But I think my favorite is the cloud
shape matching boards! Check it out here!
Enjoy!
