The Day It Rained Hearts by Felicia Bond is a sweet story that can be used with your preschool and early elementary students to target many speech and language skills in learning activities! This story is pretty short in length, with a clear beginning, middle, and end, making it perfect for your young students. I'm sharing some fun activities that you can use to work on story retelling, comprehension, phonological awareness, story grammar, and vocabulary… stay tuned to the end for a fun freebie!
Sensory Bins are always a fun, hands-on way to engage your students in learning. I found these foam hearts at Michaels, they are a perfect filler for Valentine's Day! You could also use shredded paper or beads or whatever else you have lying around. I put story props into the bin for the children to retell the story, describe the characters, and sequence events.
Crafts are another hands-on activity that can make great skill checks or take-home practice! For this one, we cut out umbrella shapes and hearts, the students answered the WH questions about the story. You could also write speech sound targets from the story, vocabulary, verbs, etc. The sky is really the limit!
Open-ended printables are my jam for targeting lots of different skills in groups, so this one is perfect for just that! Add small objects or foam hearts to cover the hearts up as you practice different skills. You can also use the objects to demonstrate prepositional concepts around your room and as the students are able to locate (receptive) and describe their location (expressive), then they can cover up a heart!
Vocabulary games go so well with this story because of all the descriptive words! For this one, I used large foam hearts I found at the Dollar Tree, but you could also use paper hearts. We did one set of synonyms and one set of antonyms, then cut them apart to create a matching game.
Practicing multisyllabic words is a skill we often work on in speech therapy and preschool, so this activity is great for targeting counting syllables as well as production. You put different syllable counts on construction paper, then sorted the hearts from my book companion to count.
Want a free comprehension check and the template for the umbrella craft? Grab those below!
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Your materials are so cute.
Thank you so much, Tami!