Pre reading activities are an important part of a read-aloud that is often overlooked. Utilize these easy strategies in your therapy, plus grab a free checklist you can use to help you stay on top of it!
When we talk about literacy in speech therapy, sometimes we just gloss over one very important component… pre-reading! Why is this an important part? Because it lets us know how much the student knows about the topic we are going to be reading about, almost like a temperature check for their background knowledge. It can also help us “prime the pump” and get those brains thinking!
There are tons of ways to address pre-reading, but I'm sharing 4 of my favorites with you today that are great for your speech sessions. They are discussions, picture walks, graphic organizers, and music and movement.
Discussions
Discussions seem pretty much like, DUH, I know. But this is important for our students especially because these are the communication skills they are lacking.
You can focus your discussion on a specific theme related to the book, vocabulary, predictions, or story structure. In this book guide for Love Monster, I focused on the theme of friendship and why or why don't our friends look like us (oh hey there diversity conversation!).
Picture Walks
Picture walks can almost make a wordless book out of any book! This is where you go through and talk about the pictures in the story. It's a great baseline for syntax and vocabulary, but you can also use this to target articulation! Looking at just the pictures helps you to focus on details that the student might now catch if they are also listening to you tell the story.
Graphic Organizers
Graphic organizers are an SLPs best friend! I love using my whiteboard to create simple graphic organizers like word webs to brainstorm. You can pair them with your discussions and picture walks to further explore ideas related to the theme of the story. For example, if I'm reading the book Bear Snores On, I might make a web about hibernating and words or animals associated with hibernation.
Music and Movement
We all know that music and movement help kids learn, and this is a fun way to introduce a story. You can find TONS of great YouTube videos (always preview first) with children's songs. One good one that I like to do is Do You Like Broccoli Ice Cream? to pair with books about eating…especially the Old Lady series since she swallows all the crazy things. It's also a good one with Dragons Love Tacos!
In case you need a cheat sheet for your books, I made these pre-reading bookmarks to help you out! You can download them for free below. I like to keep these helpful reminders inside the front cover of the book, they are easily removable with washi tape!
If you are looking for more literacy tips and tricks, I highly recommend you grab the book Literacy-Based Speech and Language Activities, it is FULL of great ideas for implementing books in your speech therapy sessions!
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