Our Favorite Books for Speech Therapy – Journey

We couldn’t leave Jenny out of the Favorite Books fun! She’s chosen Journey, by Aaron Becker as her top pick for working with all sorts of kids. Journey is a recipient of the 2014 Caldecott Honors, the highest honor for American picture books for children, and one look at the breathtaking illustrations will tell you why. (Check out this cool video about the illustrator and the making of this wonderful book!)

 

Journey is also special because it is a wordless book. Now. I know that some of you may be thinking that a wordless book seems rather incongruous with speech pathologists. In fact, wordless picture books are some of the very best books to use in therapy because they offer a visually rich, blank canvas upon which we can create anything we like. We often use wordless books while we’re evaluating a child’s language development, specifically in the area of narrative skills. You may not realize it, but kids go through highly predictable stages of narrative development just as they do in other areas of their lives, so listening to how a child puts together a story has huge value in helping us understand how their language is progressing. It’s also an area in which we can provide support and intervention that we know will help in their overall literacy development.