I’ve received many calls within the past two weeks from panicky parents about kindergarten test prep.  Applications, tours and interviews are in full swing for NYC kindergarten admission for the fall of 2012.  A child takes kindergarten admission tests by a required date to complete the application process. 

Some parents who have not yet provided kindergarten test prep are wondering what the best last minute activities are to prepare their child for kindergarten tests.

The skills required for kindergarten tests and the activities completed in my kindergarten prep sessions are best taught over a six to twelve month period.  If its crunch time for your child, here are a few important kindergarten games to play and skills to build:

1. Help your child to sit and attend to books and games he or she will happily enjoy for about 60 minutes.

2. Teach your son or daughter to define everyday words.  For example, “What is a cup?”  or “What is a blanket?”  Sometimes task directions require practice.  Playing a vocabulary and word reasoning game such as Hedbanz can be motivating and make kindergarten test prep fun! 

3. Block play - create a design or pattern with colored blocks or tiles.  Have your child copy your design and you can copy your child’s.  As bicolored blocks are used during testing, choose two colors of construction paper and cut out two triangles from at least  eight 4×4 squares.   Tape the triangles together to form bi-colored squares.   Practice making larger triangles, stripes and larger squares with the bicolored squares.  Try Pixy Cubes too.

4. Help your child understand analogies by talking about how and why things go together.  Check out this analogy puzzle.

5. Make your child think!  Ask open ended questions for your child to formulate meaningful verbal responses.  For example, “Why is it important to brush your teeth?”   “Why should you eat healthy food?” 

As a parent myself, I know how it can be difficult to work with your own child.  If you’re looking for guidance in helping your child get ready for kindergarten or for kindergarten test prep, please feel free to contact me and we can make a plan that’s a good fit for you and your child.

Stephanie Sigal works with children in their Upper East Side, Manhattan homes.  sayandplay@yahoo.com or 646-295-4473.

Wordless picture books encourage language development. Below, I’ve complied previously blogs and added more suggestions. Wordless picture books and funny pictures are excellent tools to address vocabulary, word finding, grammar, articulation, attention and pre-reading skills. Goals to improve each of these naturally fall into place when “reading” wordless picture books and describing funny pictures. Even better, the variety of wordless picture books and funny pictures available allows for activities to remain fun and fresh. You can use wordless picture books and funny pictures for…

 Articulation

Sometimes a child can say a sound (e.g., /s/) in sentences, but needs extra practice in conversation. Wordless books and funny pictures can bridge the gap between sentence level and conversation.

 Language

Take turns with your child describing the pictures in the wordless books. If your child leaves out important information when describing scenes in books or pictures, you can ask an open ended question (e.g., “Hmmm – What’s happening over here?”). If he can’t describe what’s happening, describe it for him. Perhaps your description will improve his awareness to be more specific next time.

Pre-Reading With Wordless Picture Books

When appropriate, before turning the page, excitedly ask “What’s going to happen next?” When given the opportunity to make a prediction (a pre-reading skill), children combine verbal and critical thinking skills.

With Funny Pictures

Describing funny pictures is entertaining! An instant smile appears when a child is shown a picture of the Statue of Liberty holding an ice cream sundae. This task allows your child to link visual and cognitive skills, which is crucial for pre-reading. Funny pictures need to be carefully examined, just as words need to be looked at closely to notice blends. What’s more, when a child focuses and attends to a funny picture and can explain why it is crazy a polar bear is on the beach, he is using attention and reasoning skills and making inferences.

 Social-Emotional Awareness

A child may better appreciate the feelings of others if he can interpret and describe feelings. When the opportunity presents itself, ask your child how a main character feels. You may need to be more specific: “How does Jack the dog feel after his family left him without breakfast?” Provide explanations as necessary.

Looking for some wordless picture books and funny pictures?

“Jack” Books

The “Jack” books by Pat Schories are a great introduction to wordless picture books. While the Jack books do not need to be read in any particular order, the following order works nicely:

Breakfast for Jack

Jack Wants a Snack

Jack and the Missing Piece

Jack and the Night Visitors

When Jack Goes Out

Children are interested in the characters in Jack’s life. Searching the detailed pictures for surprises is motivating, facilitates attention and assists in developing visual scanning skills.

Frog Series

The Frog Series by Mercer Mayer (and sometimes Marianna Mayer as well) is an appropriate series to try next. Again, the books don’t need to be read in any particular order, but given the language skills required within each book, this order may be preferable:

Frog, Where Are You?

A Boy, A Dog and A Frog

One Frog Too Many

A Boy, A Dog, A Frog and A Friend

Frog on His Own

Frog Goes To Dinner

I was first introduced to The Frog Series in my graduate school clinic. School-age children described scenes in a Frog book chosen for them during an evaluation so we could obtain a narrative sample.

More Favorite Wordless Picture Books

Changes, Changes by Pat Hutchins

Pancakes for Breakfast by Tomie DePaola

Carl Goes Shopping by Alexandra Day

Good Night, Gorilla by Peggy Rathmann

Hug by Jez Alborough

Rosie’s Walk by Pat Hutchins

Chalk by Bill Thomson

Window by Jeannie Baker (best for older children, purchase a used copy)

No, David! by David Shannon (My favorite, essentially wordless book, also a Caldecott*)

You can also use picture books with text, as long as the pictures are detailed. This is generally more difficult than using wordless picture books, but if you try, it will work best with *Caldecott Medal / Honor Books. One of the criteria for the Caldecott Award is that a child can interpret the story directly from the pictures. A child doesn’t need to know how to read the text, in fact, cover text if your child can read, so he can freely choose his own words.

Caldecott Favorites

Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Tale by Mo Willem

Knuffle Bunny Too: A Case of Mistaken Identity by Mo Willems

Flotsam (This is also a wordless picture book) by David Wiesner (Tuesday and Sector 7 are good for school age children)

The Hello, Goodbye Window by Norton Juster, Illustrated by Chris Raschka

When Sophie Gets Angry, Really, Really Angry by Molly Bang

The Paperboy by Dav Pilkey

Rumpelstiltskin by Paul Zelinsky

King Bidgood’s In the Bathtub by Don and Audrey Wood

A Chair for My Mother by Vera B. Williams

One Fine Day by Nonny Hogrogian

Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak

Umbrella by Taro Yashima A Tree Is Nice by Marc Simont

Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans

The pictures in books by Leo Lionni and Ezra Jack Keats also allow for great descriptions.

 Funny Pictures

I often provide What’s Wrong coloring books to children I work with so they can discuss one page a day with a parent as part of their homework. I often leave the wordless picture book that we read together in therapy for homework as well.  What’s Wrong by Anna Pomaska is good to start with. Then try What’s Wrong with this Picture? also by Pomaska.

Try this incredible set of silly photographs. Wacky Wednesday by Dr. Seuss is fun to read together. Practicing describing a worksheet or two each day from Super Duper’s 150 “What’s Wrong With This Picture?” Scenes can also help carryover speech and language skills.

By Becca Jarzynski, M.S. CCC-SLP

Making photo books with your kids is a fabulous way to help increase their language skills. It matters not if you are a mom simply looking for creative ways to provide your toddler with a language-rich environment or a dad looking for ways to help your kindergartener learn to tell stories– photo books are a flexible tool than can be used in a huge variety of ways.

How to use picture books? The general idea goes a little something like this:

Take pictures during a fun event such as a trip to the zoo or the beach,

Capture key moments in the pictures,

Print the pictures that highlight the key moments from the event,

Spend a few afternoons gluing the pictures onto construction paper, letting your children help cut, glue and color around the pictures; if your child is old enough, help him to write captions for the pictures, and

Laminate the pages and have them bound into a book that can be read over and over.

One you’ve done this, you’re all set up to use the books to help increase language. Kids love these books because they are based in experiences that they had; this makes the books both meaningful and fun. And children usually want to read the books over and over again– as annoying as this can be, it makes picture books the perfect vehicle for developing language.

With toddlers, you can use the pictures to build on language. Most toddlers love to start looking at pictures of themselves around 12-24 months, right when they are starting to rapidly increase their vocabulary and move from one-word phrases to two-word phrases. Photo books create excellent opportunities for using parallel talk, description, and expansion to help children develop new vocabulary and help them make the jump from one to two words.

Check out this video. I use expansion with my daughter, who is looking at a picture of herself riding a toy motorcycle with her brother, James. First, I wait for her to say something (“ride!”). Then I build on her words by putting them into short phrases, two different times. As a result, she comes back with a two-word phrase of her own (“James riding”)! No, it doesn’t always work this quickly….I’ve been using parallel talk, description and expansion with her for the past year and it’s only really starting to pay off now.

Toddlers aren’t the only ones who benefit from photo books, though. Using these books with preschoolers and early elementary age children can be great way to work on a whole variety of language-related skills. You can:

Work on sequencing by having your child lay out the pictures in the right order as you make the book,

Work on pre-writing and writing skills by having your child trace words you write or write his own words and sentences as you make the book,

Work on vocabulary by defining new words and integrating those words into the story and by using time words such as first, next, then and finally,

Work on language by using indirect correction, in which you correct errors in your child’s grammar by restating what he said, correctly and conversationally (e.g. Your child: “I runned really fast!” You: “You did. You ran so fast!”), and

Work on memory by having your child practice telling the story with and without the picture book in front of him.

Finally, photo books are a fantastic way to work on narrative (story) development. Developing an understanding of narrative structure (the typical flow of stories) is essential to being able to engage in conversations, tell others about things that have happened, and understand academic texts later in the elementary years. Enhancing narrative development is an asset for any child; I work on it with my son, often. It’s also a skill that can be very hard for children with language delays and specific diagnoses such as autism, so working on it with these children is essential. Using photo books to visually show stories in which children actually participated helps make narrative structure more concrete and easier to understand. At first, you can use photo books to help your child understand that the story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Later, during the early elementary age years, you can help your child form a story that has the following elements:

Setting (“We were at the zoo”)

Goal (“We wanted to see the animals,”)

Problem (“But Sally was scared of the lion.”)

Feelings (“I was so mad, because I wanted to see the lion.”)

Attempt to solve the problem (“So we went to see the owls instead. Then Sally was ready to see the lion. Mom just covered her eyes.”)

Conclusion (“After that, we had a really fun day.”)

It doesn’t have to be perfect, of course. Stories are messy, just like life. They won’t fit perfectly into those elements, nor should they. But telling stories in a way that wraps loosely around those story elements, over and over and over again, will help your child begin to internalize the flow of stories.

There is so much to do with picture books that the possibilities seem endless. What’s more, at the end of the day, you also have a book full of memories that your children will cherish for years to come. And that’s just priceless.

Becca Jarzynski, M.S., CCC-SLP is a pediatric speech-language pathologist in Wisconsin. Check out her blog Child Talk and follow her on facebook at facebook.com/ChildTalk.  Becca publishes with Stephanie Sigal M.A., CCC-SLP on ASHAsphere, the blog for The American Speech-Language and Hearing Association.

In conversation during therapy, six year old Nikki could accurately say S and Z words like “Stephanie”, “sorry” and “pretzels“.  The second her mom joined us to wrap up our session and discuss homework, Nikki immediately lost correct tongue placement, exhibiting a tongue thrust.

Oral placement therapy had previously been addressed.  Nikki’s jaw, lips and tongue were strong and stable to support all speech sounds.

Nikki’s mom found it frustrating to frequently remind Nikki to use our techniques, and Nikki didn’t enjoy the nagging.  What to do?  We added Sticky Tape (AKA Sticky Spot)!

Sticky Tape acted as a tactile reminder.  Nikki’s tongue tip was naturally drawn to the tape.  We also found when Nikki’s mouth was at rest, she did not exhibit her classic open mouth / tongue protrusion posture.  Sticky tape helped to habituate appropriate tongue and lip position. 

Sticky Tape is a smooth, thick, medical grade tape.  We fixed a small square (about 2cm x 2cm - sometimes a slightly bigger size is more effective) just behind, but not touching, the two top central teeth (upper central incisors) at midline on the hard crescent shaped area (alveolar ridge).

This spot might also be called the special spot, secret spot or as Robyn Merkel Walsh calls it, The Smile Spot.

The tape may be purchased from activeforever or flavored Sticky Spot (cherry, bubble gum, mint) may be purchased from myomadeeasy (you have to call or email to order products from the later).

When I asked Rhonda Collier of myomadeeasy what the Sticky Tape is made of, she wrote:

My prior research into concerns about possible allergens revealed that the content of the product is free of common irritants or vegan objections. The main ingredients are pectin (if you’ve ever made jam you know how sticky this is!) and fruit cellulose which is technically the cell walls of plant fiber. We use similar flavorings as used in orthodontic offices to flavor impression molds.

The unflavored tape from activeforever and the tape from myomadeeasy are both Stomahesive Skin Barrier made by ConvaTec.  Myomadeeasy just adds flavoring.

Children enjoy the option of the flavors, but the flavor wears off quickly. 

I found Sticky Tape to work most effectively when it was applied after meals.  The tape may dissolve, fall out on its own, or it can be carefully removed.  Some children don’t mind eating with the tape in place.  Generally, three small squares are used each day. 

The Sticky Tape sticks best when a child swallows saliva first.  Next, dry off the alveolar ridge with a small piece of paper towel.  Take the small square of Sticky Tape you have previously cut and hold the tape in the correct place while you sing a song or tell your child about your day.  After about a minute, the tape should adhere. 

In addition to using the Sticky Tape, Nikki and her mom followed the plan below for homework:

Tongue Tip Placement Reminders:

1. Nikki should follow the rules below for swallowing all food and liquid.  These rules are adapted from Sara Rosenfeld Johnson’s Therapeutic Straw Drinking / Single Sip Swallow technique:

A. Place the top ¼ inch of the straw between your puckered lips at midline (or if you drink from an open cup, lips only on the rim (no teeth)
B. Sip in the liquid until you feel it in your mouth
C. Remove the straw but do not swallow the liquid
D. Close your lips as you put your tongue tip up to the secret spot
E. Freeze
F. Swallow the liquid without moving your tongue tip
G. Open your mouth, your tongue tip should still be on the secret spot

2. Tongue Tip Elevation Tool - Please read about how to use this tool.

3. Tongue Tip Elevation with Cheerio - Place a Cheerio on the secret spot. Nikki should place her tongue tip into the center of the Cheerio. Her jaw should be relaxed and open about one inch.  She should hold the Cheerio with the tip of her tongue for 50 seconds, 3 times per day.

Traditional Carryover Tasks:

1. Nikki should read wordless picture books aloud.  These books will create structure when trying to produce accurate S’s and Z’s.  Describing funny pictures will do the same.

When Nikki is turning a page, encourage her to self-monitor.  Encourage Nikki to point to a drawn out “happy” or “sad” face to let you know how she thinks she did.

2. Talk about using accurate S’s and Z’s before school, when she gets home, and before you practice.

3. Have a focused period of time (about 15 minutes) each day where Nikki is concentrating on using S and Z properly in conversation. Set a timer, as necessary.

4. Choose high frequency target words that she must always say correctly (e.g., please, strawberry, school).

5. Use a mirror for visual feedback or a video camera to record a sentence or two Nikki says.  Have her critique her own speech.

6. Encourage Nikki to speak slowly all the time.

Additional Notes / Tips:

Nikki has a bad habit of clenching her jaw when she tries too hard to say s/z or when she fatigues. Encourage her to relax her jaw if this occurs.

Watch out for words that trip her up: S at the beginning and at the end of the same word (e.g., socks) – and TH blends close to S and Z (e.g., the zebra).

We also found it helpful to recruit Nikki’s teacher to help with carryover.  Nikki and her teacher made up a private hand signal.  If Nikki mispronounced S or Z, her teacher made eye contact with her and touched her own nose.  Nikki knew to slow down and say s/z correctly. Her teacher also gently reminded Nikki to use her special swallow at snack and lunch time.

Additionally, a few therapy sessions in the outside world (e.g., grocery store, library, toy store) using our techniques with store employees helped to solidify our work. 

This summer, Nikki is happily using correct productions of S and Z in conversational speech without Sticky Tape or reminders!

Stephanie Sigal is a New York City speech therapist working on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.  She works with children with articulation and language delay.  You can read more about her work at sayandplayfamily.

Children find describing What’s Wrong pictures to be a fun carryover activity for articulation, grammar and vocabulary.  An instant smile appears when a child is shown a picture of the Statue of Liberty holding an ice cream sundae!

This speech and language task also allows a child to demonstrate the ability to link visual and cognitive skills, which is crucial for pre-reading.  A child has to carefully examine a What’s Wrong picture, just as he needs to look closely at printed words to notice blends.

When a child focuses and attends to a silly picture and can explain why it is crazy a polar bear is on the beach, he is using reasoning skills and making inferences. 

Picture completion (pictures that have something missing) subtests appear on intelligence tests, such as the WPPSI (Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence), the WISC-IV (Wechsler Intelligence Scale For Children) and the Stanford Binet (Picture Absurdities).  A child’s visual acuity and reasoning skills are measured when asked to identify a missing part of a familiar pictured object. 

Try What’s Wrong coloring books.  What’s Wrong? by Anna Pomaska is good to start with.  Then try What’s Wrong with this Picture? also by Pomaska.  I often provide these coloring books to children I work with so they can discuss one page a day with a parent as part of their homework.

An incredible set of silly photographs is a great informal activity / ice breaker at an evaluation.  You can read Wacky Wednesday by Dr. Seuss as a therapy activity or provide a few worksheets for homework from Super Duper’s 150 “What’s Wrong With This Picture?” Scenes.

Stephanie is a pediatric speech therapist in Manhattan.