Speech Goals Related to Reading

I love love love books! I have been collecting books for over 40 years and owned a specialty school supply, toys, games and book store for 22 years.

1.I look at every book as a “wordless” book. This allows flexibility for modeling, rephrasing, changing vocabulary, and adding words to target language & speech sounds. Rarely do I read a book word for word.

2.First, I arrange my books in seasonal themes. Then I choose a book appropriate for the season. I read through the book and write down targeted words for speech and language goals. I determine how many students would benefit from the book. This allows me to “batch” my speech activities for a few students utilizing the same book.

3.Speech sessions CAN be fun and functional! Pair books with objects, games, iPad app, matching pictures, puppets on a stick, AAC device, etc. Get students excited about the book. Books provide flexibility and ongoing assessment of skills. For in-person Use vinyl folders for each book activity.

4. Here is an example of skills I have targeted using one book:

• reciprocal joint attention, facilitating reactions

• enhancing verbal turn-taking, word retrieval

• sentence building - increase phrase length, grammatical

structures, affixes

• vocabulary, categories, basic linguistic concepts, directions

• phonological/ phonemic awareness, rhymes

• listening comprehension - WH questions, predict intentional

phrase sentence & story recall, inference, sequencing,