By Speech and Language Therapist, Bethany Potter
In this series ‘We Love Stories’ our Magic Words Speech Therapists are going to be letting you know their favourite story books to use with children to develop their speech, language and communication skills and give you tips on how to make the most out of these stories.
It’s Bethany’s turn first! She’s chosen ‘Giraffes Can’t Dance’.
Book details: Gerald the giraffe is very good at standing still and eating leaves off trees but when it comes to dancing, he is pretty bad. His bandy knees and thin legs make dancing very difficult so instead of joining his jungle friends on the dance floor, he gets laughed at which makes him very upset. With some help and inspiration from a friendly cricket, Gerald discovers that anyone can dance… if you just have the right music. Gerald wows the jungle animals with his dazzling dancing.
Speech and Language targets: Books are a fantastic resource for addressing speech and language targets. Here are my tried and tested ideas on how Giraffes Can’t Dance can be used with children to develop their skills in lots of different ways. The overall moral of the story and the use of rhyme makes this a very enjoyable story to share during your next story time as a parent or therapy session as a Speech Therapist!
Teaching the moral of the story: Giraffes Can’t Dance is an important story for teaching children about accepting that everyone is different, embracing their own differences, and building confidence and self-esteem.
Rhyme & sound awareness:
Rhyme – Rhyme is used throughout this book in words such as ‘floor and roar’, ‘trees and knees’.
Syllable counting – how many syllables are in… ‘giraffe, elephant, dance’
Initial sounds – recognising what sound the word starts with to develop phonological awareness.
Speech sounds:
‘j’ in ‘giraffe, Gerald, jungle, imagine’.
‘n’ in ‘neck, knees, animal’.
‘r’ in ‘run, really, rhinos, roar, rock, rolled’.
‘d’ in ‘dance, different, dancer, Gerald, bad, sad’.
‘r’ blends in ‘crooked, trees, grass, froze, dream, crept’.
Vocabulary:
- Adjectives – tall, long, slim, bad, thin, splendid, clumsy, little, beautiful.
- Nouns – animal names: giraffe, warthogs, rhinos, lions, chimps, cricket, baboons.
Giraffes Can’t Dance, Written by Giles Andreae and Illustrated by Guy Parker-Rees.
