One Year of Blogging - More to Come

SpeakWell, ReadWell has reached its one-year anniversary! That inspired me to look back and consider why I began this blog in the first place. Originally, I posted a welcome message with a story of one of my students. After a few weeks I removed that section to give the page a cleaner look. But now, in honor of the blog’s birthday, I’m reposting the original welcome.

Speech therapy can address a wide variety of communication difficulties – problems pronouncing specific sounds, weak vocabulary, speaking with incorrect grammar, using language in socially inappropriate ways . . . and the list goes on!

Strong speech and language skills provide a foundation for reading and that is how I came to choose the name for this blog. When a child cannot speak with correct grammar or vocabulary he’ll have more difficulty predicting words in stories, and prediction is an invaluable skill to becoming a proficient reader. Speech and reading are both aspects of communication; our ability to communicate helps us establish relationships with others, enabling us to share our stories. And speaking of stories . . .

One afternoon I picked up a group of Kindergarten students for their speech session. On the way to my classroom one of the kids became very animated; he gestured expansively and a rush of unintelligible words came pouring out. His poor articulation made it difficult to pick up more than a couple words but he supplemented with expressive body language. When we got to my room he demonstrated even more effectively what had happened to him while on vacation. He pointed his finger like a gun, grabbed a chair and laid it on its side, then pounded his fist into his arm. What trauma he had been through since I last saw him! I pieced together his tale through his words and pantomime then confirmed more details later by talking to his teacher and parents. The family had been robbed at gunpoint and this child needed to tell his story.

Fortunately, most of my students don’t have such dramatic stories to tell, but they do need to tell their own – stories of a new kitten, a trip to the county fair, or a new pair of shoes. They also need to develop skills to read the stories of others. My purpose for this blog is to open a discussion about communication, introduce appealing children’s literature, and share experiences. I fervently hope that we all - parents, educators, and writers - help the children in our care learn to tell their own stories.

Yesterday, in my last speech group of the day, the student whose family had been robbed came for his speech session. I’m happy to report I can now understand his speech though he still has a slight lisp. I’m also happy to report he has become a wonderful storyteller and the stories he tells are not traumatic; they are full of joy, adventure and a rich family life.

Creepy Carrots! and Clever Kids

I know it is still September but October is only two days away and my students have been asking for Halloween activities for about three weeks now. So this week I introduced a story with hints of Halloween, (and it shouldn’t offend those who don’t celebrate the holiday), Creepy Carrots! by Aaron Reynolds, illustrated by Peter Brown. My students loved this book and I must admit I loved reading it to them on Monday - I still loved reading it when they wanted to hear it again on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. By Friday, I’d convinced the kids to start writing their own creepy vegetable stories and I heard some fabulous tales.

Creepy Carrots! is about a young rabbit who loves carrots, especially those found in Crackenhopper Field. He couldn’t get enough of them . . . until the carrots started following him (at least he thinks they are following him).

“Jasper was about to help himself to a victory snack . . . when he heard it. The soft . . .  sinister . . . tunktunktunk of carrots creeping. He turned . . . but there was nothing there.”

You can’t be sure, until the end of the book, if Jasper has an over-active imagination or if the carrots have actually uprooted and are trailing him. Poor Jasper sees fleeting images of carrots with jack-o-lantern faces peering out of windows, peeking around the shower curtain, popping up from a gutter – they’re everywhere. Always, when he turns, he sees something orange – an old soda bottle, a curtain, a washcloth – but no carrots. Lest you think this story is too frightening for young children, I must tell you, my first and second grade students found the idea of carrots tunktunktunking behind a rabbit hilarious and the carrots are depicted with a perfect combination of humor and creepiness. The dark illustrations – black, white and gray with a splash of orange – add to the creepiness.  When I read this book aloud, the kids’ eyes widened, their shoulders went up, and they held their breath a couple of times, but their mouths twitched upward into smiles.

By the end of the week, my students were writing their own creepy stories, and that created a great vocabulary building opportunity. We talked about categories (fruits and vegetables), adjectives, (synonyms for creepy) and we came up with a few interesting alliterative titles like: Spooky Spinach, Bizarre Broccoli, Gruesome Green Beans, Ghastly Gourds, Terrifying Turnips, and Monstrous Mushrooms. Two of my students wanted to include fruit and so we added Weird Watermelons and Appalling Apples.

The students didn’t have time to finish their creepy fruit and vegetable tales but they are off to a good start and they are saving their work for next week when October finally arrives. I foresee some great stories in the weeks ahead and when Halloween comes, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I have a few creepy carrots knocking at my door.

What Kids Say on Constitution Day

Across America, schools celebrated Constitution Day on Monday of this week. There are books, posters and artwork scattered around our elementary school in honor of September 17, 1787, when the U.S. Constitution was signed. The younger students don’t have a deep understanding – well maybe I should say, they don’t have any understanding – of our constitution or the terms that are batted around like, Founding Fathers, Bill of Rights, or three-pronged government. But they understand the three-pronged rules of our school – be kind, be safe, be responsible – and that’s a good springboard for discussing national freedoms and responsibilities. Fortunately there are excellent children’s books that help explain some of the terms and information surrounding this historical event, like this one by Lori Mortensen, illustrated by Siri Weber Feeney:

 

This book is loaded with facts and they are presented in simple language, making the information accessible to my early elementary students. One of my speech groups was especially interested in the argument over representation. The kids looked at the size of the thirteen states and saw the problem. In the book, after the Virginal Plan was presented, we read, “The plan upset leaders from states with large populations. They said it was not fair. Large states should get more votes!”

These second graders agreed – it wasn’t fair. Their solution, however, was different than that of the founding fathers. The students thought the state boundaries should have been redrawn so all of them would be the same size. (Fairness is a big issue in elementary school.) That created some new discussion opportunities, as I’m sure you can imagine. Another second grader wished he had been on the committee making all the laws. If he had been there, he would have made a law to never kill dinosaurs! We have more to learn in our speech and language sessions, but we are having fun in the process.

This book is a great tool for building vocabulary. It has a glossary to help students learn the terms and it has a timeline to chart important events. The only drawback I see – perhaps the author could have started her timeline earlier, like when dinosaurs walked the earth.