The Very Quiet Cricket

One of my favorite ways to work on language and speech is through books. Literacy is so important for all areas of a child's growth, why not incorporate it into working on their speech and language as well. And if your lucky you will create a book lover, Kayden loves books and could read with me for hours! We actually have to say we are done sometimes because he could just go and go with books!

And some of my favorite books for the younger crowd are Eric Carle. He does a great job of having simple storylines with new vocabulary and often times has a phrase on each page that is consistent that the children can help you "read". The Very Quiet Cricket's phrase is "The little cricket wanted to answer, so he rubbed his wings together, but nothing happened. Not a sound." Kids love "reading" with you and this excites them to read. His pictures are also alot of fun to look at and usually have just one main object on each page.

The Very Quiet Cricket is a great book to work on expanding vocabulary, you can grow your child's bug vocabulary- cricket, locust, praying mantis, worm, spittlebug, cicada, bumblebee, dragonfly, mosquitos, luna moth; sounds- chirped, whizzed, whispered, crunched, slurping, screeched, hummed, whirred, buzzed, quietly, and silently; they also talk about different times of day, morning, afternoon, evening, etc. It's great to read the book over and over and reinforce the vocabulary through out the day by using the words on an afternoon walk when you hear different things, see different bugs, etc and then you can also refer back to the book, for example "oh there is a mosquito, remember we read about that this morning in The Very Quiet Cricket. Mommy doesn't like mosquitos, they bite and make you itchy."

Another way to use books is by asking questions to work on Yes/no questions and WH questions, such as WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE, and HOW. As you read the book stop and ask questions and wait for answers, giving the assistance they need to be successful. Then you can also ask them questions after your done reading to recount the events with them.

Having them tell a story back to you works on storytelling and sequencing which are both important language skills. You can bridge this for younger ones or ones that have more difficulty by you re-telling most of the story and stopping and having them fill in words at first and slowly decreasing your role and increasing their role.