Why Books are the Best Tool for Speech Therapy

Why use repetitive books?

• Reinforce the speech or language skill you just worked on using a very functional activity.
• Help students with apraxia or motoric speech disorders to build their skills in connected speech with a rhythm.
• Get lots of sound repetitions with a repetitive refrain that incorporates their target sounds.
• Easily make interactive adapted books.
• Have simple language that usually matches the illustration on the page.

What a wonderful gift we are giving to students if we help them learn to love books!

If your students have problems attending to market picture books, it could be from difficulty attending that long.  Another possible reason is that the language and the pictures don’t sync well enough for students to gain meaning.

Interactive adapted books can be made as short or as long as your students’ attention spans allow!  Another benefit is that the language used is reflected in the pictures. And the interactive nature keeps kids involved during reading.

But what about older kids?

It can be difficult to find good books for older, lower-level students.

Look for books that:

• have pictures.
• are not too babyish.
• use inferring skills.
• have multiple characters and plot lines.
• have character interactions that let you work on problem-solving and social skills.

A tough set of requirements to fill! The high level/low-interest books have limited vocabulary and very simple plot lines. While this works well for reading out loud, they aren’t the language-rich books that SLPs need for older students.

Try Some Books by Chris Van Allsburg

Some of the books by Chris Van Allsburg fit this bill if your students are impossibly lost with grade-level texts. And the pictures are hauntingly beautiful!

The Stranger is a great book for making inferences with beautiful illustrations. The illustrations keep it from looking babyish. However, the plot of the story is just difficult enough to use for skill-building.

• Use it with students who have with auditory memory problems. They can practice the strategy of looking back at the text to find the important details and answer factual questions.
• The Stranger gives much practice with making inferences. Doing this with both the pictures and text of the book helps students to understand the plot.
• There’s even a great YouTube video to use as a follow-up activity. It is well-acted and lets students practice interpreting facial expressions and body language.
• Elicit language for comparing and contrasting the video version with the book.

The Widow’s Broom is another great book to read if your students have social language difficulties.

• For narrative skills, students can practice retelling the beginning of the book from two different character’s points of view.
• For conversation or past tense goals, retell the story as if they were telling a friend about what happened.
• It is also great for working on theory of mind. Will your students realize that the widow has no idea about the witch’s activities that night since she was sound asleep?
• Practice perspective-taking by discussing the varied points of view characters have about the broom. Is it wonderful or evil?

It can be a learning experience as a therapist to use books like these with your students. Do your middle school students have problems with the inferences and perspective-taking skills needed for these books? If so, it is easy to understand why they are so frustrated with the books the curriculum requires. You do have some options, though, which depend upon your particular caseload’s needs.

• Work with a more summarized version of the classroom text to meet IEP goals in speech/language therapy sessions. Websites that offer more concise book versions include:
• https://www.sparknotes.com/
• https://www.cliffsnotes.com/
• https://www.shortform.com/
• https://sobrief.com/
• Use books on the same topic that are written at a lower reading level.
• Consider which area of the student curriculum is best suited for current speech/language goals to support.

This free organizer will help you plan how to incorporate mixed goals in your speech therapy sessions all year long. If you’d like to read more about using it, check out this post.