About the Book
This series of wordless picture books aims to help children with speech, language and communication needs (SLCN) to develop their expressive sentence and narrative skills, through learning to tell each story. There are 10 stories that will be separated into two levels, geared towards advancing the child from simple to intermediate and complex sentences. The stories are written in the style of a film scroll and contain familiar events to ensure the story is understandable. The general formula of each story will be a disruption (often humorous) in familiar routines followed by resolutions. The accompanying guide will have strategies on how to teach and progress the child through each level and stage, and will have an additional skills section. Although this resource is primarily for SLCN, they could also be used for early years and reception. Kulvinder Kaur, Team Lead in Applied Behavioural Analysis (Intervention for Children with a Diagnosis of Autism), Gordon Primary School, Eltham.
Table of Contents:
Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 How to use this resource
Chapter 3 Section 1 Story scripts: Simple to intermediate
Chapter 4 Section 2 Story scripts: Intermediate to complex
Chapter 5 Additional skills.
About the Author :
Kulvinder Kaur
Review :
"Excellent resource to develop children's language skills. This resource is very user friendly - the illustrations are clear and exciting to children.
The guide book has clear explanations of how to use the resource and what sort of questions to ask the children as you read the story. This resources makes it easy to work on lots of different skills at the same time, whilst reading one story, for example sequencing, inference skills, understanding the questions.
I liked the way the books are graded in difficulty, so you work towards language targets in small, gradual steps.
This resource would be suitable for teaching assistants, teachers, Speech and Language Therapists, parents or any other education professional working with children who need support to develop their language skills." — Beth Gibby, Highly Specialist Speech and Language Therapist
"This set of wordless picture books are a versatile resource for a range of children of different ages and abilities. They are great for typically developing pre-readers and for children with learning difficulties who need to learn language concepts. The pictures are clear and colourful and depict a range of scenarios that will be familiar to children. This familiarity makes them both motivating and accessible. The guide book that is included is very useful and helps to make full use of the picture books. It includes a breakdown of a range of language skills including describing and responding to questions about the pictures and provides lots of examples, which makes it easy to use." — Beth Davidson, ABA Consultant
"This is a set of wordless picture books which take the reader through a simple story - thus aiming to generate a simple narrative. I have been using the books in my 1:1 and paired Speech and Language Therapy sessions for the last 8 weeks. The children, for the most part have a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder although some children have learning difficulties and other social communication difficulties. All of the children are aged between 4 and 8 years old.
We used one story book per week to develop both sentence structure, sentence building and narrative skills. We really liked that each of the stories has been tailored to match real life situations that the children have personal experience of, for example falling over in the playground, feeling unwell at night, and not being able to sleep, a naughty dog, watching TV, and disliking dinner. For children with ASD these are all daily experiences and therefore the narratives created can also be used as scripts, (rehearsed over time) to assist their effective communication in the future as the situation arises.
The flexibility of the stories also enabled extension of discussion through the use of feeling cards to label the emotion, and to develop empathy skills- and developing understanding of others' points of view by facilitating the child to think about their own parent/siblings' thoughts and feelings if the person in the story was them. The pictures are detailed and can also be used to develop predictive thinking ("what might happen next?") before turning the page. I have successfully used the books to develop specific use of "why? because........" sentences, as well as personal pronouns ("he/she/they," and the use of connectives such as "and," and "but").
The pictures are well drawn and easy to understand, with facial expressions clearly expressed leaving little room for misinterpretation. The stories are expressed through families/children from a range of cultural backgrounds which is useful for working in similarly culturally diverse school cohorts.
Each story has a clearly defined beginning, middle and end, allowing the SLT to build scaffolds such as "first, next, and then......., last......." creating a narrative through developing temporal concepts which children with ASD typically find difficult The stories can be used flexibly with younger children by presenting only a few pictures in a sequence, with older children using all of the pages in the book.
This is a flexible, versatile tool that has become regularly used within my therapy for all levels of sentence, narrative and social communication work. It can be used effectively alongside other visual resources such as Shape-Coding and Colourful Semantics as tools to build language skills. The books, at all levels, are pitched appropriately and the thoughtful stories are ones which children with ASD are able to relate to thus helpfully evoking spontaneous communication, as well as being a tool for rehearsing given language structures. I think this is a tool of genuine value in language impairment, Autism and other learning ability interventions. I've used the stories all term for so many different interventions- the children love the stories as they 'get them' as something they can relate to - which is brilliant as it means that not only are we developing narratives but the positive by-product is that children are rehearsing scripts for real life situations- which therefore have more hope of being generalised from the therapy room to everyday real life functional situations thus overcoming the 'generalisation' difficulty that so many of these children face." — Louise Elliott, Specialist Speech and Language Therapist (Autism and Behaviour)
"I used these books with a range of ages (5 – 10) and found them very useful, as they can be used in many different ways.
These books would be a very handy tool to keep in your bag as they are small and light and have a range of applications depending on your caseload and the targets you are focusing on. The children I used them with said they were ‘fun’ and were happy to choose a book from the selection and talk about it at the start or end of their main therapy session." — Emmy Pratt, Speech and Language Therapist
"Kulvinder Kaur's new Wordless Picture Books and Guide provides a neat pack of 10 books - each just 10 pictures long - that will appeal directly to the personal experience of emerging readers. Watching TV, playing football, a supermarket trip - these simple situational narratives are immediately familiar, and more accessible and relevant - particular to the autistic child - than tales of magic and monsters.
The book's illustrative style has evidently been chosen with the needs of children on the autism spectrum firmly in mind. Their two-dimensional cartoon look - plain, flat-coloured backgrounds, and characters full-face or in three-quarters profile - is appropriate for children who may have trouble getting the overall message of a complex picture, or those prone to becoming overly distracted by details.
A 'film-scroll' formula has been used to facilitate understanding by children with limited receptive language. Unlike standard children's books, in which the pictures are there essentially to accompany text, these images move smoothly through the stages of an event rather than jumping from scene to scene.
A significant added-value comes in the form of the Guide, which helps ensure users get all there is to be got out of the story books themselves. We are shown how to use the stories to help children explore emotions, cause and effect, sequencing, time concepts and inferencing. There is a handy list of simple and complex "wh" questions.
An online printable version of the stories - ideal for working on sequencing skills - completes the package." — Robert Bell, Specialist Speech & Language Therapist Homerton University NHSFT & Hackmey Learning Trust, in AFASIC News Autumn 2016
"These books are an excellent resource for developing language in children. I use them in my work with autistic children. The kids love the fun but simple stories. Would highly recommend for schools, parents, SLTs and ABA professionals." — Annabel O'Connor, ABA Consultant
