Category "Interactive Activities"

Interactive Books are one of my absolute must-haves materials as a preschool speech pathologist. They are so engaging and versatile for working on a wide variety of preschool language skills. I have them for every preschool theme my classroom teachers use so that I can work on language skills using relevant vocabulary. I use my “What Do You See? Interactive Vocabulary Books” at the start of every month. They are the perfect push-in speech therapy activity. I read the full color version of the book during circle time and then my students make their own book to take home using the black and white version. See below to see an example of the “Teacher, Teacher, What Do You See?” Interactive Book that is all about school supply/back to school vocabulary.

These interactive books are so versatile that you can use them for so much more than circle time and small group activities. They are excellent for preschool classrooms, special education classrooms, early intervention, and English Language Learners. I often get asked for how the interactive books can be used so I wanted to share some ideas!

I love pairing the books with a sensory bin! You can see how I paired my Bug Theme Interactive “What Do You See?” Book with a fun sensory bug sensory bin by hiding the vocabulary cards in the grass with some plastic bugs.

Another fun activity is to gather up the matching objects that go with a vocabulary book and hide them in a bag or mystery box. As the student reads through the book he/she must reach and feel the objects and try to find the correct object that matches the page. You can see below how I used a mystery box paired with small vehicles to go with my Vehicle Theme “What Do You See?” Book.

I also love printing an extra set of the picture cards to use in a pocket chart for my emerging readers to work on sight words or expanding their language skills. In the example below, I made a pocket chart for practicing sight words with the school vocabulary from my School Theme “What Do You See” Interactive Book.

One way I like to extend the vocabulary into a writing activity is by hiding the vocabulary cards around the room to do a “write the room” activity. Students search around the room to find all the vocabulary cards and write each word on their recording sheet.

These are just a few of the ways that I use my Interactive Vocabulary Books! I’m sure there are many more that I haven’t even thought of. The “I see the” pocket chart cards and the Write the Room recording sheet are available as a free bonus file with my Bundle of “What Do You See?” Interactive Vocabulary Books on Teachers Pay Teachers. The bundle has books covering 15 popular themes! Click below to grab it!

Many of my preschool students have a goal for increasing MLU or their Mean Length of Utterance. I love working on this goal in naturalistic settings and during play using Milieu language teaching strategies (modeling, mand-modeling, incidental teaching, and time-delay). Sometimes I need a more structured way to elicit longer utterances and to give my preschoolers with language delays many models of the word combinations and sentence structures that I am hoping they produce. To do this, my very favorite tool to use are Interactive Sentence Flips.

Interactive Sentence Flips are super flexible because they come with a variety of sentence stems so you can chose what level or the amount of words you want to use with each child. For example, the People Actions – Pronouns and Verbs Interactive Sentence Flips come with 3 different sentence stem options. The sentence stem options are – 2 word combos (i.e, “boy eating”), 3 word combos (i.e., “She is swinging”), or 4 word combos (i.e., “The boy is sleeping). The sentence stem options are also great for choosing whether you want to work on pronouns or present progressive verbs.

The Interactive Sentence Flips come with a great variety of themes – people, animals, fall, winter, spring, summer, bugs, and ocean animals and vary in the language structures they are targeting. The language targets that can be worked on are:  sentence expansion, increasing MLU, prepositions, verb phrases, answering “where” questions, pronouns, and emotions. They are also great for beginning readers for putting together simple sentences!

You can find the Interactive Sentence Flips Bundle on Teachers Pay Teachers!

I use interactive books almost everyday with my preschoolers so I am constantly making and putting together new ones! I use two styles of interactive books with my students. One style has the interactive picture symbols along the bottom of the page like the book below. The other style has the pictures along the right side of the book. This how to focuses on how to assemble a book in the style with the pictures along the bottom of the page.Materials needed: printer, laminate, adhesive velcro, scissors, book rings or binding coils

Step 1: Print out all the pages of the book. Cut along the dotted lines near the bottom of the pages. Cut out the picture symbols. Do NOT cut the page that has blank squares along the bottom.

Step 2: Laminate all pages. Place rough-sided velcro on the picture symbols and soft-sided velcro on the blank squares throughout the book.

Step 3: Decide whether you would like to assemble the book with book rings or with binding spines. If you are using book rings, either use a two-hole punch or a hole puncher to punch two holes in the upper 2/3rds of the book. Then use book rings to assemble the book. The full-size page with the blank squares along the bottom is the last page of the book.

Step 4: Place the picture symbols on the blank squares on the last page of the book. Your book is ready to go! Have fun reading it and seeing how engaged your students can be with interactive pieces!

I have interactive books that cover dozens of themes and language concepts! To see all the interactive book sets available click here!