Page 41 - Literacy Based Speech Language Therapy Activities Digital Version

How to Use Storybooks in Speech Language Intervention

2. Pre-Reading Activities – Before You Open the Book

Before I began literacy-based intervention I would gather my students for therapy, do the greetings
or explain the day, and pop open the book. Within the next 30 minutes I would probably do an
activity and conclude the book. Good therapy, but it wasn’t until I incorporated pre-reading

activities that I began dismissing students at a startling rate.

When we work with diverse populations we can't make any assumptions about whether the
child knows the stories, has books at home, has literate parents, speaks our language at

home...

The list goes on and on. Remember that academic expectations are based on children from Western
culture, who probably grew up being read to, who have an inherent knowledge of specific story

structures, that were presented in their native tongue. This is absolutely fine, we just can’t make
assumptions that our students have this in place prior to entering our therapy room. This isn’t just
a cultural or second-language issue. Even children from Western cultures with impairments lack core
linguistic abilities and benefit from creating a foundation to build their abilities. By creating pre-

reading activities, we can rule out these possible influences so that we can concentrate strictly on the
disordered areas.

Pre-reading activities engage the student prior to reading the story, introduce them to new vocabulary

and historical events, and prepare them to comprehend the story in a more meaningful manner. Pre-
reading activities are used to bridge gaps between a student’s current skills and the targeted skills.
Connecting to the child’s background is essential. Without closing this gap, we are reading at the

child, not to him (Coppola, 2004).

Great Pre-Reading Activities

Music
Music provides us with an engaging way to introduce new vocabulary
for a topic. You can find a song on nearly any topic on the internet

simply by searching: TOPIC + Song. We have created a list of songs
related to some of the more common topics which you can see at www.
bilinguistics.com/music-for-speech-therapy/. You can make your own

play list or start grouping songs by topic to build your own library.

Let’s use the Kindergarten topic BODY PARTS as an example. We
could read Eric Carle’s From Head to Toe and here are some songs that you could play:

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www.bilinguistics.com