Many SLPs love books and we tend to gravitate to our same favorite books year after year.  If it is not obvious by our numerous essays on narration, we are big fans of literacy-based intervention and use storybooks as tools for evaluation and treatment.

But why do we choose the books we choose? Why some but not all? 

We recently had the “barefoot librarian” from Barefoot Books pay us a visit at one of our staff meetings. She brought us boxes of bilingual books, and asked our opinions of them.  We immediately tore into these boxes, searching for our next favorite books for speech therapy.  How did we do this? We scoured the books for language concepts, opportunities for practice of specific sounds, sequencing, wh- questions, inferencing, etc.  This seemed “normal” to us, but she was intrigued with how we determine what was valuable.

As it turns out, as SLPs we look at books VERY differently (and are often much more picky) than educators, authors, librarians, and parents.  Working with bilingual children, the anty is upped even more because the resources are limited. This got us all thinking about what makes a book seem “good” to our SLP brains.

Key criteria that are important in selecting successful books for speech therapy

1. Ample opportunities for the child to participate
2. The ability to work on specific goals in the context of the book
3. A structure that enables easier story-telling

One of the best ways to increase a child’s participation (without relying on his or her ability to demonstrate reading fluency and comprehension), is to select a book that has repetition and predictability.  Predictable books have been a hot topic with educators, librarians, and literacy coaches for many years, and for good reasons.

“Predictable books make use of rhyme, repetition of words, phrases, sentences and refrains, and such patterns as cumulative structure, repeated scenes, familiar cultural sequences, interlocking structure and turn-around plots. These stories invite children to make predictions or guesses about words, phrases, sentences, events and characters that could come next in the story.”

Mary Jett Simpson, in Reading Resource Book, 1986.

“Predictable books allow early readers to predict what the sentences are going to say, thereby increasing enjoyment and helping to build vocabulary and memory skills.”

Education Oasis

Note that predictable books are more easy to identify with books written for younger children.  We often see more overlap of characteristics in different types of predictable books in stories written for older children, as they contain more story elements.

Types of Predictable Books

There are eight different types of predictable books. We can use these eight groups to categorize the books we read and get a better understanding of what each book has to offer.   These predictable categories enable us to better define WHY our favorite books for speech therapy are successful, thus helping identify new titles for future sessions.  Click on the story type below to jump to an explanation and examples in English and Spanish.  Find them in your library or clicking on the image will take you to Amazon.com.

Great Resources for Predictable Books

What style of predictable book is your favorite?

I don’t know about you, but reading this and understanding WHY and HOW I choose books for speech therapy makes me REALLY excited! I immediately began to Google “Predictable Books” and found a ton of resources and book list upon book list.  Of course, all the book lists were books in English, so I “Googled” “Predictable Books Spanish”….  Crickets.

I found some links, but not anything like the lists of English predictable books.  Most of them were books that you can reduplicate and write in words, but not complete narrative structures and definitely nothing that fell into the eight types of Predictable Books.  So we decided to create our own!  Click below to check it out.

Searching for Predictable Books

Addtionally, here are some awesome resources on predictable books with English suggestions  that you can use with your English-speaking kiddos.   We wrote a whole new essay on it :  Predictable Books.  Enjoy!