Banter Speech & Language

Sydney speech pathologists helping adults and children speak for themselves.

rhyming books

Dear Santa: 13 tried-and-tested stocking-stuffer books for preschoolers

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Poor Santa! So many presents to find, for so many little people, with so little time! Luckily, we’ve been on the case, searching high and low for the best books to help stimulate preschoolers’ language development – from the Galston Rotary Giant Book Fair to the Scholastic Super Book Sale at Sydney Olympic Park.

So, for Santa and all his weary helpers out there, we are pleased to present 13 book suggestions based on what’s working well for our preschoolers in the clinic right now.

Need more book ideas? No worries, we’ve got you covered.

Ho Ho Ho!

Duck in the Truck by Jez Alborough

One of my kids’ favourite books when they were young. They could recite the whole book and loved the rhyming. Jez Alborough’s excellent illustrations add to the text with lots of movement and frivolity.

Things I Like by Anthony Browne

Anthony Browne’s books are smart, thought-provoking and beautifully illustrated. Our personal favourites are Gorilla and Piggybook, and Things I Like is great for verbs.

Night Noises written by Mem Fox and illustrated by Terry Denton

Follow the adventures of a ‘fat old dog’ Butch Aggie on a wild winter’s evening as she attempts to protect ‘nearly ninety’ Lillie Laceby, who has drifted off to sleep by the fire, from unknown people outside the house. Are they robbers?

The Carnival of the Animals by Marianne Dubuc

Watch as a carnival of wild animals transform into other animals. Lots of lovely repetitions of the verb ‘to dress’.

Look and See written and illustrated by Shane Morgan

Another book featuring animals and action words, this time Australian fauna like kangaroos, emus, dingos, and frill-necked lizards, running, jumping, howling and hopping around the country.

Bouncing by Shirley Hughes

As the title suggests, there’s lots of bouncing in this book. The illustrations help reinforce the verb and as an added bonus, the inside sleeves feature illustrations of young children acting out another 17 verbs including bending, reading, scowling, looking, smiling, counting and drinking.

Let’s Go, Baby-o! by Janet and Andrew McLean

More actions on display with the McLeans’ Let’s Go, Baby-o! We love the rhymes, in the vein of Janet and Allan Ahlberg, and the illustrations of baby, Mum and random animals demonstrating the actions including pounce, thump, flap and hop.

Kissed by the Moon by Alison Lester

Alison Lester is one of our favourite authors of books for young children. Kissed by the Moon is a beautifully illustrated, verb-packed lullaby, perfect to serenade a baby to sleep.

Flashing Fire Engines by Tony Mitton and Ant Parker

Part of Tony Mitton and Ant Parker’s Amazing Machines series. We love these books as they appeal to children who like vehicles. They also provide excellent commentary about the particular machine’s function and how people, like firefighters in this case, operate the machinery.

Also available as an audio book with lots of noise to accompany the action.

Polar Bear Night by Lauren Thompson and illustrated by Stephen Savage

Another lovely bedtime tale about an insomniac polar bear cub wandering around her arctic neighbourhood, gazing at the sleeping animals, before a shooting star show helps her to fall asleep. Another of my kids’ childhood favourites and a New York Times bestseller.

Going shopping by Sarah Garland

A patient, if slightly harried-looking mother takes her two children and dog to the supermarket. Reminds us of the Berenstain’s Inside Outside Upside Down with its few words and limited number of pictures to describe an everyday adventure.

Piglet and Mama by Margaret Wild and illustrated by Stephen Michael King

Piglet loses her Mama in the farmyard and the farm animals try to distract her from her distress with suggested activities like snoozing with the cat, chasing the donkey, and cuddling the duck, but Piglet just wants her Mama. Margaret Wild and Stephen Michael King are a winning combination.

What the sky knows by Nike Bourke and illustrated by Stella Danalis

A short-listed book for The Children’s Book Council of Australia book of the year, it explores a girl imagining what it would be like to know all the things the sky knows.

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Banter Speech & Language Banter Speech & Language
Banter Speech & Language is an independent firm of speech pathologists for adults and children. We help clients in our local area, including Concord, Concord West, North Strathfield, Rhodes, Strathfield and all other suburbs of Sydney’s Inner West.

Banter Speech & Language is owned and managed by David Kinnane, a Hanen- and LSVT LOUD-certified speech-language pathologist with post-graduate training in the PreLit early literacy preparation program by MultiLit, the Spalding Method for literacy, the Lidcombe and Camperdown Programs for stuttering, and Voicecraft for voice disorders. David is also a Certified PESL Instructor for accent modification.

David holds a Master of Speech Language Pathology from the University of Sydney, where he was a Dean’s Scholar. David is a Practising Member of Speech Pathology Australia and a Certified Practising Speech Pathologist (CPSP).

Do we spend too much time on rhyming books? What else should we do to prepare pre-schoolers to read?

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Duck in the Truck
The Cat in the Hat
Madeline, with her vines and twelve little girls in two straight lines

All great, fun books to read aloud – my sons love them; and so do I. But do we spend too much time playing around with rhyming books and not enough time working on other skills children need for reading before they go to school?

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SING A SONG OF SIXPENCE

Sing a song of sixpence,
A pocket full of rye;
Four-and-twenty blackbirds
Baked in a pie;
When the pie was opened
The birds began to sing;
Was not that a dainty dish
To set before the King?

(During the next verse, somebody’s nose gets nipped.)

Before I answer this, let me back up for a moment and explain a couple of key concepts.

Phonological awareness

A strong predictor of later reading and spelling skills in pre-schoolers is what we call their “phonological awareness”. Phonological awareness is hard to explain. Essentially, it’s the child’s ability to attend to, identify and manipulate sounds in spoken words. It covers a bunch of sub-skills, including an understanding of:

  • rhyme (e.g. cat-hat-mat-sat, etc.);
  • stress patterns in words (e.g. the stress is on the first syllable of “water”; and on the second syllable of “begin”);
  • syllables or “beats” (e.g. elephant has three syllables: el-e-phant);
  • how words can be broken down or “segmented” into individual sounds (e.g. dog (d-o-g) is not the same word as dot (d-o-t)); and
  • how individual sounds can be put together or “blended” to make words (e.g. d+o+g = dog, a four-legged canine.)

Speech pathologists and other experts in early education agree that the explicit teaching of these skills is critical for later literacy education. This is because, in English, our written language uses an alphabet, a type of code. Written words are made up of letters (not sounds). But, for most of our words (over 80% of the time), the letters we use to spell are determined by the sounds they usually make. In other words, to understand the alphabetic code and to be able to read efficiently, children must not only know their letters, but the sounds they make.

Phonological awareness skills and literacy – which skills are needed most?

The research evidence tells us that, for pre-schoolers who are going to school next year:

  • phonological awareness activities should focus on the development of skills at the sound (phonemic) level (Brennan & Ireson, 1997);
  • sound segmentation and blending skills, and recognising the relationships between letters and sounds, are more strongly related to later reading and spelling than syllable or rhyme awareness skills (Hulme, Goetz, Gooch, Adams, & Snowling, 2007);
  • teaching letter knowledge and phoneme/sound awareness together may help both skills develop more efficiently than teaching the skills separately; and
  • skills like rhyme awareness may develop with improvement in speech production – either naturally or with therapy – and through general language stimulation at home or in school (Gillon, 2005).

So, yes, by all means have fun with rhyming books, nursery rhymes and songs. But make some time to play with sounds with sound segmentation, blending and letter-sound activities and games.

Your speech pathologist can offer some suggestions, and help you design a phonological awareness program for your child, either in therapy or for you to deliver at home.

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Image and poem source: http://tinyurl.com/k3w4ost

Banter Speech & Language Banter Speech & Language
Banter Speech & Language is an independent firm of speech pathologists for adults and children. We help clients in our local area, including Concord, Rhodes, Strathfield and all other suburbs of Sydney’s Inner West.

Banter Speech & Language is owned and managed by David Kinnane, a Hanen- and LSVT LOUD-certified speech-language pathologist with post-graduate training in the Spalding Method for literacy, the Lidcombe and Camperdown Programs for stuttering, and Voicecraft for voice disorders. David is also a Certified PESL Instructor for accent modification.

David holds a Master of Speech Language Pathology from the University of Sydney, where he was a Dean’s Scholar. David is a Practising Member of Speech Pathology Australia and a Certified Practising Speech Pathologist (CPSP).