When my three boys were younger (About Me), I always looked for books that had minimal text and bright colorful pictures. In fact, some of our favorite books were wordless picture books (The Snowman, Carl books). In a wordless picture book, the illustrator creates a series of pictures that tell a story. There is little to no text on the page and the magic is that YOU can create your own story to go with the pictures. Without text, there is more freedom to talk about what is happening on the page. This allows you to have a conversation about the picture and practice expressive language skills. This blog post is all about how I use wordless picture books during speech and language therapy sessions. I will also feature some of my favorite wordless picture books. Finally, there is a link to a FREE wordless picture book that you can download at the end!
Why Wordless Picture Books?
It’s no secret that I love using busy picture scenes during my speech therapy sessions (see this Blog Post to learn more)! Similarly, I also love wordless picture books. Wordless picture books open up the door for communication. They inspire imagination and creativity. Without text, there is less pressure to read the books perfectly and more freedom to simply enjoy the story. It is the perfect time to focus on speech and language skills. In addition, they are a great choice for mixed groups because they are so versatile!
As you probably know, wordless picture books can be used to target a variety of speech and language goals. Here are some ideas:
Expanding utterances with carrier phrases (e.g. “I see a ____”)
Collecting spontaneous speech language samples
Speech sound carryover skills (sounds in sentences or conversation)
Answering questions (e.g., “What is the boy doing?”)
Specific grammatical structures (auxiliary verbs, pronouns, verb tenses, etc)
Vocabulary
Narrative Language Skills
Writing skills (Have students write out a story to go with the pictures)
Looking for details
Describing skills
Making inferences
Feelings and Emotions
Sequencing and Retelling the story
A Few of My Favorites
I think my favorite wordless picture book is Chalk by Bill Thomson. I love the bright pictures and the story is truly magical! In this sweet story, a group of children find a bag of magic chalk and whatever they draw comes to life. As you can imagine, the story gets pretty exciting when one of the boys decides to draw a dinosaur!
After my students create their own Chalk story to go with the pictures, I always ask them what THEY would draw with the chalk. Most students tell me that they would draw a million dollars or a fancy race car. I had a thoughtful student tell me that he would draw houses for homeless people. My favorite response was from a 5th grade bilingual student who said that he would draw his grandmother so she would come back to life. You can learn so much about your students with this simple question!
I have listed some of my other favorite wordless picture books below:
The Typewriter By Bill Thomson
Good Dog Carl by Alexandra Day
Carl Goes Shopping by Alexandra Day
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A Free Wordless Picture Book!
Finally, I am offering this FREE wordless picture book when you sign up to join the Pinwheel Speech email community. Ben’s Busy Day a simple story about a boy’s day at school and his after-school activities. This wordless picture book is part of a larger grammar unit that teaches about irregular past tense verbs (Ben’s Busy Day Grammar Unit). You could also use this wordless picture book to target other sentence structures (e.g., pronouns, auxiliary verbs), speech carryover skills, narrative language, sequencing, retelling, etc. This is what I love about the flexibility of wordless picture books!
I hope this blog post has inspired you to use wordless picture books during your speech therapy sessions. I would love to hear how YOU have used them! Please comment below!
