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Creating Incredible Games that Match Story Content

6. Creating Incredible Games that

Match Story Content

Speech Therapists Just Play Games!

Have you heard this? Maybe it was uttered by another educator as they passed through our
therapy room. Maybe it was shared by a parent who was watching our session in the home or clinic.

The onlookers were aware of the fun being had but innocently unaware of the focus of the activity.
The truth is that there are a lot of things that we do that could be characterized as “having fun.” In
these cases, we can easily justify our activities with explanations of the goals that we are focusing on
and the desired outcome.

Games and play create a perfect storm of some of the highest levels of engagement, open minds,
motivation to remember through competition, and just plain fun. What is lacking, and what this
section promises to share research information showing that structured game-playing is an effective

way to solidify your speech and language gains. Justifying what we do is only a tiny part of it.
Storybooks generally fall into eight narrative categories that make their outcome “predictable” in

certain ways. By learning about these eight types of predictable books, we can generate board games
that match the narrative structure. If a child learns (or makes) a game, a child learns the structure.
Boom! Try to pull that off with other therapeutic techniques!

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

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.

‐www.educationoasis.com

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