Book It, Pt. 22: Although I Don’t Like Snow...
Kids do! I was skimming the shelves at Barnes & Noble one day when I
saw the cute little picture book "When it Starts to Snow," by Phillis Gershator and Martin Matje.
The title instantly made me think, "temporal structure!" Through adorable
illustrations and rhyming text, the book describes what a variety of animals do
when it starts to snow: the cat stays in the window, the fish "lies low." As
the text proceeds, your students will be poetically bombarded with a complex
sentence structure describing varied wildlife reactions to snow.
Besides the focused stimulation
involved in actually reading the book, there are a number of ways this book can
be useful to SLPs:
-Perspective taking and causals.
Discuss why each animal does what it does, and why grownups don't like the snow
quite as much as kids do!
-Before reading the book, work on
the "ow" word family. Brainstorm a list of words that rhyme with "snow."
-Pause on the page about the
stoat for a teachable moment on inferencing, description and comparative
language. I had no idea what a stoat was, but apparently it's a white sort of
weasel.
-Use the hidden animals page to
work on spatial concepts. Where are all the animals hiding? Do you see the
snake inside the rock pile and the bat at the top of the cave?
-Organize the different animals into
their categories. There are different schema you can employ (i.e. farm vs. home
vs. mammals vs. birds vs. reptiles).
-Finally, use my Bingo cards! Made with Microsoft Office clip art, these
can be used first as a receptive language game (again, incorporating the script
in the file, a focused stimulation of temporal structures). Then have the kids
take turns being the "callers" so that they can use verbs and temporal language
to describe all the actions of the animals when the snow flies. There is a script and eight different cards,
so you can easily use this when co-teaching in a classroom. Feel free to share!
Enjoy! I am quite glad we have
seen very little of the white stuff up in Boston (knocking on wood). Next up: a
book about "snow days," which, again, I'd be happy to be without!
Read more of Sean Sweeney at www.speechtechie.com