ABC Speech Picture Book

About a year and a half ago, it became very clear to us that our daughter, then 2, was more than just a late talker.  At 27 months she was diagnosed with a speech disorder, apraxia.  (You can read our apraxia story by clicking the link.  We praise God for her leaps and bounds developmentally!)  

Knowing M would not outgrow this, but she could overcome it definitely motivated me to do what I could with her.  My husband and I learned a lot from M's speech therapist, but I also made sure that we played purposefully as much as possible.  M loved to complete crafts with me, and the ABC Speech Book is just one of the projects we had fun doing together.  

First, I cut all the letters of the alphabet as large as possible, of the alphabet.  (I just eyeballed the letters as I cut them.)

Then I made a list of all of M's words for each letter of the alphabet.  When we started we only had a handful of letters with word approximations.  As the list grew, we were able to complete more of the letter pages though!

To prepare the pictures, I used our own photos for people in our lives or special items around our home.  Google Images helped us with the remainder of the words.

Then we chose a letter that she had a lot of word approximations.  She already knew lots of letters, and learned some others.  M glued the letter to background paper.  Then she picked a picture (prepared ahead of time) to glue to the paper.  I had her say the word as she glued it.  After all the word pictures were glued to the paper, we would "read" the page. 

Once completed, it would be a book that the child could "read" by themselves, even if they had a very limited vocabulary!  

Some notes:

Based on our experience, I would suggest NOT using construction paper for the background paper.  It makes the completed book very thick.  Also, they don't fit in a three ring binder.

We used signs a lot for a lot of words, and this actually helped M increase her vocabulary.  Some of our word pictures were photos of a person signing a word!  When introducing these pictures, I would just ask M what the child was saying with their hands.

One last suggestion is to put the date of each completed letter on it for your own records, unless you intend to complete them all within a short period of time.  My daughter's vocabulary grew incredibly from beginning to end.