Building Language: Favorite Preschool Books

Do you have a preschool-age child at home?

Are you searching for books to help build language skills?

Do you have some tried-and-true options, but are you looking for more?

I love using books and other literacy activities in my speech therapy sessions.

Why do I love reading books in speech therapy sessions? Books are fun. Books are supported by research as being an effective tool to build speech and language skills. There are many more reasons I love books, but those are my top two. This post will focus on books I use to build language skills in my clinic. I’ll list a few of my favorites and let you know what books are on my wish list!

If you are interested in helping your children learn sounds (articulation skills), check out my previous post on books I use to work on the /s/ sound.

If I use books in my clinic, I get a lot of use out of them. If you are a parent, it is likely you know just what I’m talking about. Sometimes, you get just plain tired of a book you’ve read over and over. I tend to “retire” (give to Goodwill or box up for later) books I don’t often use and add new books to my collection several times a year to give myself (and my clients) a refresh. However, some books stick with me through all the changes. These are books I use for a variety of ages and goals, and these books are my gold standard. Read on for the books I’m really enjoying lately and keep coming back to!

Building Language: Favorite Preschool Books (My List)

Remember (and I’ll make this short because I say it often), the most important tool to help your child build his or her language skills is you. Talk about the pictures. Make animal noises or surprise sounds while you read a book. Make the reading experience fun. As you read, model language. As long as you are talking and having fun while you read the book, your home practice will be a success. It doesn’t matter which book you choose!

Dear Zoo, by Rod Campbell (A Lift-The-Flap Book)

In this book, the narrator writes to the zoo to ask for a pet. He gets sent a variety of different animals (you can lift the flaps to see what they send), but they end up being too big, too tall, or too fierce. The book has a happy ending because the narrator is (finally) sent the perfect pet.

You can find this book on Amazon here.

Moo, Baa, La La La!, by Sandra Boynton

This book has expressive drawings of animals with animal noises on each page. This book is good for younger children who are naming animals and animal sounds. For this book, after reading it a few times, your child may “read” (as in, remember the words) it with you!

You can find this book on Amazon here.

On My Wish List

There are a few books I’m hoping to add to my collection in this category, so I thought I’d list them here. They both look like great choices!

Little Blue Truck, by Alice Schertle

This book expands on animal noises and introduces a lovable character – a blue truck that says “beep.” The rhyming in this book is engaging, and I’ve heard adults and children alike find themselves going back to this book!

You can find this book on Amazon here.

Giraffes Can’t Dance, by Giles Andreae

In this book, the main character really wants to dance. He finds it difficult to do so with his long legs (as he seems to buckle at the knees). The writing in this book is engaging, and you can’t help but love the giraffe, who just really, really wants to dance.

You can find this book on Amazon here.

Will I Like the Book?

If you want to check out these books, I suggest clicking on “listen” on the Amazon link to see if this might be a book you’d like to check out at the library, borrow from a friend, or buy. Also, you can look on You Tube to watch a video of someone reading the book to see if it turns out to be one you like.

If you’ve got a book you love reading with an early preschool age child, let me know! I’m always on the lookout for more books to read with my clients.

How Speech Therapy is Like the Redwoods

Visiting the Redwoods

About once a year, I visit the Redwoods. I drink delicious coffee, I strap on my backpack and hike, have a picnic lunch, and hike some more. By the end of the day, I finish my hike with aching feet and a happy heart.

I love the Redwoods. I love the light filtered through the trees. I love the sound of the trees creaking in the breeze. I love the quiet. I love the variety of trees, plants, trilliums, and burls I see along the way. The Redwoods is my place, and every year I’m ready for it.

But, what if I wasn’t ready?

Are You Ready?

Last year, in the parking lot of my favorite Redwoods hiking spot, I met a man from Texas and his adult son. They had rented a car and were hitting all the national parks in one summer.

“I don’t mean to be rude,” he said to me, in a slight southern drawl. “But, I’ve been to a lot of national parks, and this one just doesn’t impress me.”

Of course, I had to ask. What hikes did he go on? Did he picnic in the park? Did he notice the varied-colored trillium flowers in full bloom? What about the burls on the redwood trees, which tend to take on shapes if you stare at them long enough?

It’s not that kind of trip, he told me. When he visited a park, he would park his car, walk a quarter mile or less, take a picture or two, and then drive to the next park (or to his hotel). He had to get to all the parks this summer, he explained.

On the surface, I had many things in common with this man. I frequent national parks and typically enjoy seeing them. I enjoy travel. Even so, we had two totally different experiences of the same park. How?

Change Takes Work

At the time, I was confused. Once I had time to process, I decided he wasn’t ready for the Redwoods.

Sometimes – depending on the situation – I’m happy to take the quarter mile hike for the photo experience. There are times when that is all time permits, or I have a different journey to go on next. The most important thing is to know what kind of experience you are looking for and to realize that experience may take more effort. Even so, I still believe sometimes you have to take the long hike.

Think of something you’ve really worked for, appreciated, or built. Immediately, my own business came to mind. In order to experience my business, I have a plan when I set out. But, I have to be willing to adjust that plan and stick with that plan in order to see any real results. In the case of my hike, I needed to stay on that trail for quite awhile before I was really able to see what the forest had to offer.

Speech Therapy: The Journey

This brings me to another commitment: speech therapy. Like the forest hike, when you commit to speech therapy, you can’t just walk a quarter mile and take a picture. In order to see improvement in speech therapy, you have to go on the long hike. You may wonder if you are making progress. You may have setbacks. But, the results are in store for those who stay consistent and stay the course. There are rewards to be had, but you need to be consistent in order to gain them.

I’ve worked with families who haven’t been able to consistently attend speech therapy. I have worked with families who have gotten overwhelmed and have quit. When this happens, I remind myself: they are in for a different kind of hike. I understand why they leave, but still I hope they will return when they are ready.

Remember if you aren’t ready for speech therapy, you can give yourself grace. But, please. Consider the hike. Because if you stick with it, there are so many rewards waiting for you on the trail.

I hope this post has given you some time to reflect about your family’s journey with speech therapy. If you are feeling ready to take the speech therapy leap, please visit my contact page to reach out.

My Three Favorite Books for Practicing the “s” Sound

Some favorite books for practicing the “s” sound in speech therapy and at home

Is your child practicing his or her /s/ sound in speech therapy? If so, read on for a list of my three favorite books for practicing the “s” sound.

If your child is already producing the /s/ sound correctly in words and phrases, retelling stories with the “s” sound can be a great way to practice. Books are my favorite activity to practice speech sounds at this level. Books can be a great way to tell a story, retell a story, and answer questions about a story using your best speech sounds.

This post focuses on some of my favorite books for the /s/ sound, which is a common sound my clients are practicing at my clinic. Feel free to watch You Tube videos of these books, check out the book from your library, borrow from a friend, or buy a book or two that you’d like to have at home to practice these sounds.

This book contains some Amazon affiliate links.

In no particular order, my favorites are:

The Paper Bag Princess, by Robert Munsch

This book is about a prince and a princess (see, we are getting to those /s/ sounds already!). A dragon takes the prince away, and the princess is left with figuring out how to save the prince. The ending is not your typical fairy tale (and perhaps a bit abrupt), but there are so many great /s/ sounds in this book:

Princess

Castle

Prince

Handsome

Fierce

Forest

(and more)

Today I Feel Silly, by Jamie Lee Curtis

This book discusses a range of emotions felt by the main character. It’s a nice book because it not only describes several emotions, but also has quite a few /s/ sounds, such as:

Silly

Cookies

Sell

Small

Discouraged

Straight

Sad

Face

(and more)

“Stand Back,” Said the Elephant, “I’m Going to Sneeze!”, by Patricia Thomas

As the title suggests, this book is about an elephant who is about to sneeze. The last time he sneezed, the animals of the jungle weren’t so pleased. The elephant’s sneeze blew off the stingers and wings of the bees, blew the feathers off the birds, and created many other nuisances. This book has more words than the others, so is better for children who can sit for a book with several sentences on each page. This book also includes a lot of /s/-blends (including /sn, st, sw/), so it’s a great one for children practicing /s/-blends as well as /z/ sounds (lots of those, too!). The /s/ sounds in this book include:

Sneeze

Stand

Friends

Bouncing

Jouncing

Us

Some

(and more)

Considerations

Although it may be tempting to read the book and move on, try to really spend some time with each book. Here are some suggestions (give some of them a try):

1. Before you read the book, look at the cover and some of the pages and make predictions

2. After you read each page, have your child tell you something that happened on that page using his or her “new” /s/ sound

3. Practice retelling the story when it’s all done by using your /s/ sound (use the pictures to help)

4. Find the letter “s” or “c” (which can make the /s/ sound) on a page, read the word and make up a sentence using that word

I hope this post has helped you find a new book to try reading with your child to practice your /s/ sound. Although these books have plenty of /s/ sounds in them, you don’t need these specific books in order to practice your speech sounds – any book will do! For even more book ideas for different sounds, this Speech Sprouts page has some great book ideas.

Best of luck as you practice reading, talking, and saying your best speech sounds. I hope your child has fun, builds confidence in his or her speech abilities, and gets lots of speech practice in with these books and ideas!

Speech Therapy Mistakes: Childhood Apraxia of Speech (Part 2)

Speech Therapy Mistakes: Childhood Apraxia of Speech (Part 2) discusses another (less common, but still prevalant) method of treating CAS: oral motor therapy. Although oral motor therapy may be an effective treatment for other disorder areas, it is not recommended as a treatment for Childhood Apraxia of Speech (CAS).

This is the second post on common mistakes made in speech therapy for clients with CAS. Like the last post, this common mistake also applies to any child with a significant speech sound development challenge.

As a quick review, here’s my disclaimer (and the idea behind) this common mistakes series:

Mistakes. We all make them.

There are some specific ways that speech therapy for children with Childhood Apraxia of Speech may look a bit different from traditional articulation therapy. Finding what works can be a trial and error process.

So, what if we could skip all that? That would be pretty awesome, right?

The Pitfall

A non-speech oral motor movement could be:

blowing bubbles

smacking lips

mouth stretching

passive stimulation exercises

(and more)

Does this help children make clearer speech sounds? No.

There are specialists in oral motor therapy who work on a variety of different areas. This article doesn’t discuss this type of therapy in general. Instead, this discussion focuses on using oral motor therapy for the sole treatment of Childhood Apraxia of Speech (CAS).

A variety of research has been done in this area, a good summary is Dr Lof’s presentation at ASHA, which you can download here.

Ultimately, using non speech movements does not result in speech sound development gains. Using these techniques used to be pretty common. Although some clinicians may still use them, as a whole this method has become unpopular and not often used.

Try This Instead

So, what does work?

The following is a list of types of interventions (and descriptions) of what does seem to work for speech therapy in children with Childhood Apraxia of Speech.

Good, old fashioned speech therapy does the trick. Your speech language pathologist may focus on a combination of any of the factors below to help your child speak as clearly as possible.

Focus on Speech Sounds –
Your child will need intense and freqent production of speech targets. Your speech language pathologist may use a variety of cues to provide a visual of the speech sounds. Cues can be visuals (such as pictures), touch cues, or hand signs.

Focus on Prosody (Think: Not Monotone) – 

Focus on getting away from quickly-paced, monotone speech. When a child uses speech without varied intonation, he or she can be difficult to understand.

Using Signs or Pictures to Communicate Frequent Needs –

Try using home signs or pictures to help your child communicate frequently-used words. For example, a child may have signs he or she uses for favorite snacks. If you have pictures of commonly requested snacks, have your child choose from those instead. If you have signs for commonly used snacks, try using those.

Individual Intervention – 

Individual speech therapy helps children with significant speech sound challenges. Group speech therapy gives children less practice and less one-on-one attention.

Treatment Effectiveness Summary

In conclusion, non-speech movements are not effective for improving speech sound production.

What does work?

Frequent articulation intervention

Cues

Prosodic Intervention

Gestural Communication or Pictures

Individual Speech Therapy

The treatment interventions used by a speech language pathologist will be based on your child’s individual needs. Typically, several approaches will be used. Ultimately, the decision will be based on what would help your child best communicate in his or her everyday life.

Extra Credit

If you are interested in learning more on this topic, check out the American Speech and Hearing Association’s (ASHA) treatment recommendations here.

I hope this article was helpful in learning more about what is recommended for children with CAS in speech therapy, as well as what is not. If you are looking for more information, check out the ASHA link above, or talk to your speech language pathologist. All the best of luck as you continue on the journey to help your child clearly communicate!

Speech Therapy Mistakes: Childhood Apraxia of Speech (Part 1)

There are some common speech therapy mistakes when treating Childhood Apraxia of Speech (CAS). Last blog post covered what to do in speech therapy for children with CAS. Today’s post focuses on what not to do.

If you are just joining us, and want to know what Childhood Apraxia of Speech (CAS) is, please catch up on earlier posts in this series.

Mistakes. We all make them.

Maybe they aren’t actually mistakes. We come up with an idea and try something new and…it falls flat. Should we call it an “oops”? A “whoopsie”?

There are some specific ways that speech therapy for children with Childhood Apraxia of Speech may look a bit different from traditional articulation therapy. New clinicians sometimes struggle with how to provide intervention for children who have CAS and often learn from experience. Parents might work with their child based on what they’ve read online online to find that it doesn’t really seem to be working as well as hoped.

So, what if we could skip all that? That would be pretty awesome, right?

I’ve got more than one common mistake in mind, but today I’ll focus on the most common one I’ve seen. Of course, the purpose of this post is to take a (hopefully) gentle approach to a common mistake and to spend plenty of time on what to do instead. This is a mistake often made with students with more significant articulation (speech sound development) challenges, including Childhood Apraxia of Speech.

As a new clinician, I made this mistake. Most of the parents I work with tell me they find themselves making this mistake. You aren’t perfect, I’m not perfect. But, if you can learn what not to do ahead of time, maybe the time you spend at home practicing your speech words can be better spent. That is a win for you, for your speech language pathologist, and for your child.

So, let’s get to work. What is it? How can we avoid it? How can we learn from it? What should we do instead?

The Pitfall

Spending too long at the isolation, syllable and word level.

Remember when we talked about Childhood Apraxia of Speech being a motor planning disorder?

That means it is very different for a child to say a word in isolation than to say the same word in conversation.

What do I mean?

As we speak, we anticipate the words which come next. When speaking in conversation, we also have to coordinate the specific target sound using the coarticulation, the way the brain sends messages to the tongue, jaw, lips (and so on) to form words from different starting places.

For example, say the word “sweet.”

Easy, huh? You had time to start with that tricky /sw/ blend and start that word moving from a neutral position.

Now say “I ate a sweet candy yesterday” and “my sweet candy was broken.”

Your mouth had to move from the “a” sound to the /sw/ sound for the first phrase, and from the “y” sound to the /sw/ sound for the second phrase; that is coarticulation. As you can imagine, speaking at the sentence and conversation level involves a lot of motor planning from different mouth positions, instead of (like at the word level) perhaps starting at a neutral position. Coarticulation involves some tricky movements and motor planning as the starting positions vary.

Try This Instead

So, what to do instead? It is still a great idea to start learning new sounds in isolation, syllables and words. However, when working with a child with CAS, let’s not spend too long there! Your speech language pathologist will be able to share with you when a good time for this might be.

Activity Suggestions

Here are a few activity suggestions that will target practicing a targeted speech sound where the child will need to speak in longer utterances, thereby practicing targeted sounds using the added challenge of coarticulation.

A caveat: I’m assuming here your child already is speaking in full sentences. Your child shouldn’t be expected to use specific words in long sentences if he or she is only speaking in phrases. If your child’s speech language pathologist has shared it’s time to move on from the word level, below are some activity suggestions to target speech sounds in longer sentences.

Wordless Picture Books

A wordless picture book allows a child to make up sentences about a story. Another way to approach these books is for an adult to tell the story and then have the child retell the story. This typically works best for younger children if it is done one page at a time, since it’s difficult to remember the whole story.

The books I use most often are Frog, Where are You and Flotsam.

If you’d like a list of more ideas, visit the children’s book guide here.

Pictures

These pictures could be cut out of a magazine, taken from Google Images, or taken from snapshots on your phone or Instagram feed. The photos can be of anything you’d like – preferably something that will interest a child and get them talking! Practice – with a slowed rate if needed – telling 2-3 things about each picture.

Answering Questions

This can be done in a shared reading activity, while driving in the car or in an interview with your child. Your child can practice answering your questions in a full sentence. The questions can be factual or silly, as long as the answers are in a sentence and use the child’s best speech sounds!

If you’d like some suggestions of fun questions to ask, here is a fun list.

Making Predictions

Making predictions can be a fun way to use full sentences using targeted speech sounds. Find a funny picture or You Tube video. You’ll know what types of videos your child likes watching, but a fun clip to practice prediction (and telling why you made your prediction) is a segment from the Ellen show “Epic or Fail.” Of course, watch clips on your own first to make sure they meet your acceptability standards.

This post contains some Amazon affiliate links.