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Picture Book Vocabulary -Strategy: Integration From Prior Knowledge

Back to school picture books are a wonderful start to any school year. Reading them helps prepare kids and offers the opportunity to talk about

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Back to School Picture Books to Build Vocabulary: 2nd edition

I’m back with the second round of back-to-school picture books as a powerful strategy for increasing vocabulary. I hope you enjoyed the first of the

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What Cinderella Taught Me This Summer

The Frenzied SLPs are excited to announce new discussions, twice a month, designed to help you share your ideas and become #SLPStrong! This week, we are

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Oh me gee! I started a blog!

Hi Y’all! Welcome to my new blog. I’m so excited, but if I’m being honest…a little nervous too. I’ve been writing a blog in my

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Language-based literacy intervention for SLPs.
Turn picture books into targeted therapy sessions.
Evidence-based strategies you can use tomorrow.

Sequencing a story is a real skill. It builds temp Sequencing a story is a real skill. It builds temporal awareness and it gives you something measurable, especially with younger students or those with emerging language.
But it has a ceiling.
Students with DLD often show the biggest gaps in causal reasoning and character motivation, and those gaps won’t surface on a sequencing task. Narrative macrostructure, the parts that capture why events happen and how a character’s goal drives the story, is what predicts reading comprehension outcomes down the line.
The shift isn’t about abandoning sequencing. It’s about knowing when a student is ready for more and making sure the goals reflect that.
I am not telling you to toss your favorite books. I am not telling you to toss your favorite books. 😅The Old Lady series is engaging, kids love it, and it has a place in therapy. But if you are reaching for books that offer rich, deep language value, they are a limited tool because the structure really only gives children one opportunity to predict a confirmed outcome, and predicting and inferencing are not the same skill. Inferencing is a higher level language skill, and it deserves books that give children room to read between the lines, construct meaning from implied information, and sit with complexity. The question is not whether a book is fun or familiar. The question is whether it is actually doing the clinical work you need it to do.

📚Predicting: I Went Walking by Sue Williams, The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen, and Jump, Frog, Jump! by Robert Kalan.
📚Inferencing: The Invisible Boy by Trudy Ludwig, Those Shoes by Maribeth Boelts, Two Bad Ants by Chris Van Allsburg, and Each Kindness by Jacqueline Woodson.
📚Both: Enemy Pie by Derek Munson, Chrysanthemum by Kevin Henkes, The Stray Dog by Marc Simont, and Piggie Pie by Margie Palatini
The Old Lady books have a place for sequencing and The Old Lady books have a place for sequencing and speech sound practice! But for language development, look for books with Tier 2 vocabulary, complex sentence structures, and clear story grammar so students are working with language they can actually learn and use across contexts. 🫶🏼👵🏼
I used to wonder why my students couldn’t generali I used to wonder why my students couldn’t generalize vocabulary beyond our sessions, and it took me a while to figure out what was missing.
I was teaching words. I wasn’t teaching the process for figuring out words. 😬
That process is a language skill, and it belongs in our sessions. Students with language disorders often skip unfamiliar words, guess randomly, or wait for someone to explain, and that pattern follows them into every classroom and every subject.
When we teach word learning strategies explicitly, modeling the thought process and practicing across multiple texts, we give students something that transfers. Vocabulary growth starts happening during reading, not just during therapy.
Research supports this directly. Word learning strategy instruction is linked to improved comprehension outcomes for students with developmental language disorder (Steele and Mills, 2011; Nash and Snowling, 2006).
If your student can decode a sentence but has no idea what it means, this is a reasonable place to look.
start targeting word learning strategies as a language skill, not just a reading skill. 🙌🏼
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