Children’s storybooks featuring animals can be highly effective tools for teaching speech and language skills. Animals are often fascinating and relatable characters for children. Their unique characteristics, behaviors, and personalities capture children’s attention, making them more engaged in the story. This engagement encourages active participation and interaction, which are crucial for language development. Read how Gabrielle Rizzo’s storybook, Sophie’s Special Story, addresses many speech and language goals.
This book is about the special bond between an owner and her dog, Sophie. This unique story line expresses Sophie’s adventures as she journeys through life with Gabriella. The purpose of this book was to creatively target speech and language goals through Sophie’s experiences. Throughout the story, Sophie’s development is revealed through her descriptors. These descriptors can be used to target articulation disorders, specifically for /s/ and /s/ clusters. Additionally, this story has verbal and visual prompts so parents can use the prompts as a strategy when working with their children on the /s/ sound. Sophie’s Special Story also has opportunities to target language goals such as answering WH questions, labeling common objects, increasing vocabulary through descriptions, expanding syntax, describing emotions/feelings, and sequencing and story retell. This publication is a powerful and helpful tool/material for speech language pathologists because they can use this one resource to target many goals; this will especially be beneficial for group speech therapy sessions. Sophie’s Special Story is an entertaining and diverse book that can be enjoyed by teachers, parents, specialists, and children alike!