STORY ACTIVITIES

Speech/Language Activities for Home/Classroom Use

Susan Bastardo, M.S. CC-Sp

Reading to your child is a wonderful way to spend time together as well as to promote language development. Children should be able to enjoy just sitting back and listening to the uninterrupted reading of an enjoyable story. However, if your child needs support to develop language skills (understanding, processing, expression) stories can offer a motivating medium. The activities listed below are not meant to accompany the reading of every story but should be used occasionally followed by a story read purely for enjoyment.

1. Comprehension/recall: After reading 2-3 sentences, ask a question about the information that was presented. If your child is not able to answer the question, ask them to listen carefully to the sentences again and try to find the answer. Read the sentences slowly and emphasize the information if necessary.
    
2. Inferences: After reading a passage, ask a question about inferred information (i.e. “reading between the lines.”) For example, in the story Caps for Sale, we read “Nobody wanted any caps that morning. He began to feel very hungry, but he had no money for lunch.” We could ask, “Why didn’t he have any money?” and your child would need to make a connection between selling caps and having lunch money. Or, in the story What Do you Do With a Kangaroo, the raccoon states that he never eats with dirty paws so he wants a finger bowl. We could ask what he’s going to do with the finger bowl.
    
3. Predicting: When reading a new story that your child has not heard before, ask him to guess what will happen on the next page. See if you can come up with a few possible outcomes before you turn the page.
    
4. Retelling: Show your child how you can “tell” a story using the pictures but not the text. Retell stories in your own words and give your child the opportunity to do the same. This is a nice way to expose your child to books that may be a little too long for them to attend to.
    
5. Monitoring accuracy of responses to questions: If your child needs to work on answering questions accurately, you should talk about questions words (“who, what, where, when, why, how”) and the matching answers (person, thing, place, time, reason, method.) As you read a story and ask recall/comprehension questions (as in item #1) see if your child’s answer matches the question that you asked. If not, explain to them that you are, for example, asking a “who” question so you are looking for a person. Then read the information to them again and ask the question with emphasis on the “who.” As another example, if you are asking a “what kind” question, explain that you are looking for a “kind” of toy, etc. and then read the passage again reminding them that you are looking for a “toy” word.