Experts agree that weaving a child's natural "affinities" or "enthusiasms" into lesson plans is the best way to keep them engaged and motivated.
Here's a way to take a simple $3.00 Little Golden Book and make an interactive language activity for preschoolers to take home with them until they master the language in the book. Materials needed are a Golden Book, clear packing tape, laminator, scissors, self-adhesive velcro and a good Netflix show for when you are cutting and "velcroing".
The pictures below of the WALL•E and BIG HERO 6 Little Golden books were adapted for a preschooler working on the following goals: answering questions with a visual, increasing utterance length, pronouns, identifying emotions and -ing words.
Here's a way to take a simple $3.00 Little Golden Book and make an interactive language activity for preschoolers to take home with them until they master the language in the book. Materials needed are a Golden Book, clear packing tape, laminator, scissors, self-adhesive velcro and a good Netflix show for when you are cutting and "velcroing".
The pictures below of the WALL•E and BIG HERO 6 Little Golden books were adapted for a preschooler working on the following goals: answering questions with a visual, increasing utterance length, pronouns, identifying emotions and -ing words.
Step 1: Go through the Golden Book and type out questions and answers that target your child's language goals.
Step 2: Tape the top or bottom of the pages in the book using packing tape to reinforce the areas you will be attaching velcro.
Step 3: Print out the questions and target sentences, then laminate the pages.
Step 4: Cut out each word of the "target sentence" and attach velcro. This way the child literally builds the sentence as he/she puts each word back on the page while saying the word. In addition, the act of putting each word back on the page helps slow down the pace of the child's speech and allows for articulation or fluency practice. Pre-literacy skills are also being reinforced as the child is learning that each printed word conveys meaning.
Step 5: Allow the child to take the book home and to school for additional practice. Each time the child comes back to speech therapy have them bring the book with them so that the speech-language pathologist can take data on progress.
Words of encouragement for when your hands get tired from cutting and velcro adhesive keeps getting stuck on the scissors: It takes a while to make the book, but children become very enthusiastic about the books and spend hours looking at them. They really want to take them everywhere! The payback is tremendous.
Generalization of skills learned is typically quite easy because pictures of their favorite topics are usually in many other places besides the book: toys, movies, t-shirts, shoes, cereal boxes, etc. They see their favorite character and can recall the sentences they learned in the book to use when describing other objects in everyday life.
Sometimes the kids might lose a word, but this is actually a good thing! They become aware that the sentence does not "sound" correct without all of the words on the page. The kids end up coming to speech therapy requesting specific words!
Step 2: Tape the top or bottom of the pages in the book using packing tape to reinforce the areas you will be attaching velcro.
Step 3: Print out the questions and target sentences, then laminate the pages.
Step 4: Cut out each word of the "target sentence" and attach velcro. This way the child literally builds the sentence as he/she puts each word back on the page while saying the word. In addition, the act of putting each word back on the page helps slow down the pace of the child's speech and allows for articulation or fluency practice. Pre-literacy skills are also being reinforced as the child is learning that each printed word conveys meaning.
Step 5: Allow the child to take the book home and to school for additional practice. Each time the child comes back to speech therapy have them bring the book with them so that the speech-language pathologist can take data on progress.
Words of encouragement for when your hands get tired from cutting and velcro adhesive keeps getting stuck on the scissors: It takes a while to make the book, but children become very enthusiastic about the books and spend hours looking at them. They really want to take them everywhere! The payback is tremendous.
Generalization of skills learned is typically quite easy because pictures of their favorite topics are usually in many other places besides the book: toys, movies, t-shirts, shoes, cereal boxes, etc. They see their favorite character and can recall the sentences they learned in the book to use when describing other objects in everyday life.
Sometimes the kids might lose a word, but this is actually a good thing! They become aware that the sentence does not "sound" correct without all of the words on the page. The kids end up coming to speech therapy requesting specific words!
