What Can You Do With a Good Book? Let's Talk About It!

I have always been a sucker for a good book.  As a kid I read non-stop.  I actually had one teacher who told me I was going to ruin my eyes.  Another - a Reading Class teacher - kept running out of books to give me.

Fortunately, I managed to pass that on to my own kids.  My adult daughter's favorite part of graduating from Law School this year?  Time to read books again!
And my hyperactive son would sit still for hours for one thing only - being read to.

When I was a school district SLP in Massachusetts, I worked in a town that had a fabulous independent children's bookstore.  I spent many hours and a few small fortunes there; buying both for my own kids and for my caseload.

I worked mainly with the students in the Language-Based classrooms and almost all of my intervention was literature-based.

I know of many other SLPs who also use children's storybooks in intervention.  A brand new post from Speech Sprouts talks about some of her favorite books for therapy; including Press Here.

If you follow this blog, you know I often talk about books I've used and activities I've created for them for repeated shared readings to build language and literacy skills.  I also include picture communication icons for students who need visual cues in activities, as well as a core word-based communication board for the specific story.

Last week's post featured Max and Mo: Let's Build a Snowman and activity pages for sequencing skills.
This week I thought I'd talk a little bit about You Will Be My Friend by Peter Brown. (This post contains an affiliate link).





In this book, Lucille Beatrice Bear wakes up one day and sets out to make a new friend.  There are lots of opportunities for both laughs and lessons as you read about her friend-making strategies.  And of course a lesson as the end.

I take the time to stop after each episode and talk with students about how Lucille tried to make friends with each animal in turn, what happened, what went wrong.  I work with students with significant disabilities these days, so this takes some time, support, visual cues, and scaffolding.
I provide lots of visual cues and cause-effect maps.

If you want to check out the book, click on the Amazon link above.  It's a big hit!
If you'd like to look at my resource to go with the book, click on this link to go to my TPT store to see it.
And if you'd just like to try my comprehension questions for the story, just drag these from this post onto your desktop.






Until next week, Keep on Talking!