Fall into These Favorites of Mine

Fall into These Favorites of Mine

Fall is my favorite season for so many reasons, but one of the best parts is the opportunity for describing the changes around us with our kids. This past week in speech and language therapy, many of my students have listened to the book There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Bat! By Lucille Colandro. This book is a favorite of mine because I can target so many different language and speech production goals with it. My older students have been able to work on auditory recall without the pictures to sequence the story using transition words (think first, next, then, finally, last). We’ve used it to work on attributes, from labeling, naming a function, all the way up to categorizing and providing relevant details about the objects that this crazy old lady has swallowed. The kids find the old woman hilarious, so it keeps them engaged during my language tasks. My students who are working at a more basic level still benefit from this book, too. There are tons of rhyming words throughout the book, and it gives me the opportunity to ask basic “wh-” questions. I even used it this week for a student who was working on their /s/ blends in speech production. I love this book for preschoolers all the way up to about the 4th grade level when using it for auditory comprehension.  

Another book that I used in preschool this week was How Big Could Your Pumpkin Grow? by Wendell Minor. With my youngest kids, I have been using this to work on spatial concepts. Parents can do the same thing by focusing on where objects are on each page (e.g., Look at that pumpkin! It’s in front of the wagon). I also use this book for older students when I need to target synonyms and antonyms. There are opportunities on every page for the kids to form their own sentences using the synonym words we learn about. A really fun activity I like to include is to use an atlas to link the activity from each page to the actual location that it occurs in throughout the Unites States. The back of this book contains extension information about the place of the activity/event from each page in the book. Don’t let the simplicity of this book limit how you use it with your kids. Stretch their minds, encourage them to wonder, ask them how they would build the structures they see, or why a certain page is realistic or fictional.

Best of all, go outside and grab something from nature to describe. You could talk about textures (bumpy, smooth, gooey, hard, rough, prickly, etc.), smells, colors, spatial (position) words and more with stones, tree bark, leaves, sap, pumpkins, corn stalks, apples, hay, sticks, and so on. Play “Simon Says” using these objects to help your kids focus on listening comprehension. Have older kids build structures like a birdhouse using only objects from nature. When you get back inside, ask them to name 4-5 things they saw and worked with outside. Fall can spark tons of creativity and imagination; your kids just need you to light the fire.