If you’ve ever read a story that keeps building and repeating until kids are joyfully shouting along, you’ve experienced the magic of a cumulative story. These rhythmic, repetitive tales are not only fun—they’re powerful tools for language development. With their predictable structure and rich vocabulary, cumulative stories support memory, sequencing, and verbal expression in a big way.

In this post, we’ll explore what makes a cumulative story so effective in speech therapy and classroom settings. You’ll get a list of our favorite cumulative stories picture books, ideas for how to use them in your sessions, and practical strategies for helping students build their own. Whether you’re targeting grammar, narrative skills, or articulation, cumulative stories can bring structure and joy to your work.

What is a Cumulative Story?

A Cumulative Story is a story that builds on a pattern.  It starts with one person, place, thing, or event. Each time a new person, place, thing, or event is shown, all the previous ones are repeated (Example: Giant Turnip). 

Catch if you can’: The Cumulative Tale

Cumulative stories are great for therapy because:

• There is LOTS of repetition, repetition, repetition (can you say, “Increased number of productions?!”). We love this for teaching a new sentence structure and for articulation practice.
• The macrostructure tends to be a problem/solution type of structure. Each event reinforces the initiating problem of the story and a new attempt at solving it.  It helps children to think outside of the box of different solutions to the same problem.
• Many contain the “typical” macrostructure elements such as characters, setting [time and place], problem, solution, initiating event, character intentions and desires, and moral.
• The end of the story is distinctly different from all the previous, reduplicated events. This gives the end of the story an OOMPH that can be used to teach the concept of wrapping up a story with a strong ending.
• There are many opportunities for predicting what may happen next. Many times, the sequential events (and attempts to solve the problem) are the same, so the child can pick up on that pattern. The final, different event makes predicting even more fun and shows that there can be numerous ways to make a prediction.
• They can be adapted across age/grade levels, to work at the cognitive level of the student(s).

How to use Cumulative Stories in Speech Therapy

As an example, here is one of our favorite cumulative stories, and how we like to use it in therapy to target a variety of goals:

The Giant Turnip/El Nabo Gigante

by Aleksei Tolstoy and Niamh Sharkey

A great language expansion strategy to use while reading Cumulative Stories is cloze procedures. The SLP describes the repeating phrases and events, and slowly says less and less, letting the students fill in the gaps.  This requires them to pay attention, and the repetition of events and sentence structure helps them be more successful after hearing it numerous times.

We like to use lots of visuals when reading Cumulative Stories. These are great stories to sequence as you go, adding one item to your sequence strip at a time, and reinforcing the concept that everything prior to that event is repeated.

How to make your own accordion book:

A fun take-home activity to use with Cumulative Stories is an accordion book that opens up to more and pictures with each turn of the page. The student can glue each picture on the strip and by the end, they have a completely sequenced story.  Here’s an example of how to do an accordion book. Check out these pictures and this 5 minute video on how-to make your own accordion book for cumulative stories.

1. Take an 8.5×11 piece of paper and cut it in half length-wise.  If it is a long story, tape the two short ends of each half sheet together, so you have one very long strip of paper.
2. Fold the paper in half, width wise. Open the paper and fold the ends of the paper, in equal sized sections, towards the midline. If you are using an 11 inch long piece of paper, you will have a total of 6 equal sized sections.
3. On one side of the paper you will put pictures from the story in REVERSE order, from RIGHT to LEFT:
   1. Picture of the problem, or initiating event
   2. First attempt at the solution/First event in the cumulative sequence
   3. Second attempt at the solution/Second event in the cumulative sequence
   4. Third attempt at the solution/Third event in the cumulative sequence
   5. Fourth attempt at the solution/Fourth event in the cumulative sequence
   6. Picture of the resolution of the story and/or the words “The End!”
   7. On the other side of the paper, put the title of the story on the second section (when going from LEFT to RIGHT). The rest of the sections on this side will be left blank.
   8. Now, turn the paper back over and fold in each section over the one in front of it, folding from LEFT to RIGHT. The title page should appear on the front after the last fold.
   9. To read your accordion book, open the title page first and you’ll see the initiating event. Keep unfolding your book to show the sequential attempts at the solution. The previous attempts will still be showing, so you can repeat each attempt at solving the problem (much like what is done in these cumulative stories).

Want to Get More Out of Your Speech Therapy? – Use Predictable Books

There are eight different types of predictable books as well as ways to use all the different types of predictable books with games. 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 also enable us to better define WHY our favorite books for speech therapy are successful, thus helping identify other book titles for future sessions.  Click on each story type to read more about each type of predictable books.

1. Justifying the Use of Speech Therapy Games with Literacy Research
2. Familiar Sequence Story: A common, recognizable theme such as the days of the week, the months, etc. Example: Today is Monday
3. Chain or Circular Story: The story’s ending leads back to the beginning. Example: Where the Wild Things Are
4. Cumulative Story: The story builds on a pattern. It starts with one person, place, thing, or event. Each time a new person, place, thing, or event is shown, all the previous ones are repeated. Example: There was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly
5. Question and Answer Book: A question is repeated throughout the story. Example: Brown Bear, Brown Bear
6. Repetition of Phrase Book:  A phrase or sentence is repeated. Example: Goodnight Moon
7. Rhyme Book: A rhyme, refrain, or rhythm is repeated throughout the story. Example: Chicka Chicka Boom Boom
8. Song Book: Familiar songs with repeated phrases, sentences, rhymes, or refrains. Example: Five Little Monkeys
9. Pattern Story: The scenes or episodes are repeated with a variation. Example: Froggy Gets Dressed

Note that predictable themes are easier 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.

For loads more information about fun intervention strategies that incorporate books, be sure to check out our book, Literacy-Based Speech and Language Activities.

And if you want to earn CEUs and learn how to effectively learn how to use storybooks in intervention and make games, check out the Literacy-Based Everything Pack