This week is all about Valentines Day! I've been using this cute little book for lots of my younger kids this week. I like it because it has great pictures with a lot of action, but few words. That way I can get the kids to make more inferences and think a little bit more about what's happening in the story.

This story is about a family of mice that make and deliver Valentines to all of their neighbours. Like all of the other books I do, this one lends itself to lots of different levelled activities. My kids who are just learning how to put words together can practice describing the pictures:




"He is falling," for example.




​For kids using more complex language, I use this book for inferencing questions as I mentioned above. It also lends itself well to a few vocabulary words, such as "deliver," "anxious," and "relieved."

There are so many great activities that can accompany this book. For one kiddo learning location prepositions, we played a hide and find game. 

I mentioned there were lots of good opportunities for inferencing and predicting in this book because of the limited words. Some questions I might ask are:

• What holiday do you think this book is about? (I always do a cover-prediction, where I ask the kids questions before we've even opened the book. Depending on their attention span, I may also ask them to predict what might happen in the book.)
• How do the mice feel about delivering Valentines?
• How will their friends feel when they receive the Valentines?
• How do you think these mice know each other? (ie: family, friends, classmates?)
• What is the parent thinking when the little mouse falls off the sled? (I sometimes use a thought bubble sticky note to practice these questions)
• It's winter, so what do you think the pond is like? What will it be like to cross it?
• How do you know the mother mouse realized the little mouse is missing?
• What are they feeling when they find the little mouse buried in snow?
• What could they do to help him?
• How do they feel once they get him out?

You can see, there are a lot of questions about feelings here! Valentines Day is also a time when I focus on feelings with my kids. The Story Grammar Marker from MindWing Concepts uses a heart shaped icon to indicate feelings in a story, so it gels in nicely with Valentines Day. We start in the context of the book, discussing how the family feels when they're delivering Valentines, when they realized one of the mice is lost, and when they find him again. Then we do an art project thinking about all of their own feelings. This is a great jumping off point for the Zones of Regulation as well. In the art project below, we just used pink hearts, but you could easily use hearts to correspond to the Zones. 

This book can also be used for some articulation practice. There are quite a few consonant clusters to target, such as "sl," "gl," "fl," and more.

Stay tuned for next week (or the week after that, let's be honest!) where I share the next selection of book-related activities.

Thank you for reading and happy speaking!
​Amanda

Well, it turns out it did take me over a week to get out our next Activity of the Week. It has been a busy time at Grow, as we are GROWing! Two new clinicians have been hired this week, so stay tuned for some "Meet the SLP" entries to get to know the new team members better.
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But, finally and without further delay, here is this week's Activity of the Week. To continue on our snow theme, even though all the snow has been long rained away here in Vancouver, we read Snowmen at Night last week. This is a great book for discussing perspective taking and expected/unexpected behaviour in a fun and silly way. With some of my preschool and early elementary kiddos this week, we did the following extension activities with it:

• Acting out all of the zany things the snowmen did in the book - this is a great way to incorporate some movement into the session after a time of sitting still and reading!
• Answering some inferencing and perspective taking questions about the book:
  • Do you think what the boy imagines really happens at night?
  • What might actually be happening? What is a different possibility?
  • How would you feel if you saw snowmen heading to the park and playing after dark?
  • How would they feel if they saw you watching them?
  • Why do the snowmen drink "ice cold" cocoa?
• Following directions to complete our own "snowmen at night" picture
• Telling our own stories about our snowmen at night. What kinds of silly things did our snowmen do?
• Making play doh snowmen and using them as figurines to tell stories. For some of my younger kids, we used the play doh snowmen to practice building sentences and using verbs. "The snowman is running, the snowman is jumping, etc"

I did read this with a few older kids as well and used it as a jumping off point to make a bio poem. After reading that bio poems ("bio" as in biography) can be a good way to increase perspective taking skills in middle schoolers, I've started to incorporate this into some of our narrative language sessions. We first make bio poems about ourselves and then we work through the template with characters in the books we read. Typically I do this with more serious characters, but this week, we made a bio poem about silly snowmen! :) ​

Stay tuned for the next Activity of the Week!

Thanks for reading, 
​Amanda

Welcome to our first Activity of the Week! This is where I’ll showcase something I’ve worked on this week. Most of my sessions center around a storybook, as storybooks are an effective way to teach vocabulary, grammar, narrative structure, inferencing, and more. It also keeps my kids engaged! AND, I just love books, so any excuse to read them works for me! 

For those kids that have a bit more trouble sitting through a book, sometimes I will make modifications, such as reading the book while sitting on a platform swing, reading the book one page at a time and acting out whatever action is happening while we read, or giving the kids manipulables or small figurines that go along with the book and letting them play with those while we read. 

A little disclaimer, obviously not ALL clients are right for this activity. Be sure to match your book and activity choice to your client’s interests and abilities. That said, I’ve been able to use kids picture books with a lot of my older clients as well and, to be honest, they have loved it! I think a lot of “big kids” actually miss having picture books read to them (that’s not research-based, just my own experience!). I often tell my older kids, “We’re going to learn older kid skills but with a younger kid book,” and they don’t mind at all. I’m just always sure to extend their learning with another “older kid” activity after. I may pair the picture book with a related article from ReadWorks or may tack on a writing activity on a topic from the book. For my book this week, The Mitten, I often use the Winter Is Coming article, which often segues into a nice discussion about why some of the animals would probably not be wandering around in mid-winter to find the mitten!

But now, without further ado, my activity this week! Last week we experienced a massive snow-dump here in Vancouver. (Well, massive for Vancouver!) So my book choices have been all snow themed. (Stay tuned in the future for a list of some of my favourite kids’ books organized by theme!) This week we did The Mitten by Jan Brett. This book has so many amazing teaching possibilities, I just love it. Here is a sample session with The Mitten:

First we read the book. With any kid above Kindergarten level, I let them help with some of the reading. Depending on the child’s literacy skills, they may read the whole book, do one page here and there, or at least help with a word or two on each page. This book has some words that are repeated and fairly easy to sound out, like “Baba,” “snow,” “mitten,” and more. Most kids, even those with reading difficulties, can at least get those words and then feel some success in the book reading part.

Then, I usually prime them with some questions about the narrative elements. I use the Story Grammar Marker format from MindWing for this. Studies have shown that asking children questions about narrative structure can increase their success in including the components in their retell. I also love to use manipulatives to go along with the story. I have a little snow-white mitten myself and I made a few paper animals to go in it. We use some dolls from the dollhouse for Nicki and Baba.