Encouraging Simple Speech Through Books

ANY book can encourage speech, and highly repetitive ones are great for filling in the blanks.  (Brown bear, brown ____, what do you ___?  I see a red bird looking at ___.)   We also use books to label objects and characters.  Colors and shapes.  Counting and rhyming.  Books have been a great help in helping M learn to talk, but not all children respond to books the same way.  Though our daughter has always enjoyed books, she did not respond to them with sounds (the way I spoke of above) until quite recently...the last six months or so.

We have a few books that M returns to over and over again that encourage speech...simple words and phrases that are enticing to her as a 3 year old with a speech disorder.  These books are great books, but especially good for anyone who wants to increase sounds and words from a child.

Zip!  Pop!  Hop! ($1.29 at Amazon!) actually talks about fun words.  It begins, "Elmo likes fun words.  Would you like to say some fun words with Elmo?  Say zipper.  Now stretch it out: z-z-z-z-ZIPPER.  Words with z's make your mouth feel fizzy."    M really likes this book, and did long before she could say any of the words (other than pop).  It's fun and cute.  Most importantly, it encourages speech.

Richard Scarry's Splish-Splash Sounds  is a great book.  It goes around Busytown and you see all sorts of labeled illustrations with their sounds.  You see things like "bang," "owww-ee," "ring," and tons more.  M really likes this book!  She labels the objects in the pictures and tells me the sounds.

Oink, Moo, How Do You Do? is a rhyming book of animal sounds.  It's quite cute.  It taught M the word "shoo!" when the farmer says, "Scat, shoo!  Away with you!"

You might remember quite some time ago when I was all excited to learn about the Speak With Me books.  (Click to see more of what I said and where to find them.)  These were the first books that I was aware of that were designed for speech development

We also the book Grandma Rabbitty's Visit that had a lot of fun words for M to say in it.  (Click the link to read my review.)

I have another book to share with you called The Big Book of Exclamations; it is a truly unique book, and it deserves its own post.  It is designed and written by a speech pathologist and is specifically designed to promote speech development and the imitation of sounds, gestures, and words!  I will share about this book soon.  We just got it, and I already think it's a great resource for young children or those who have a speech delay/disorder.