This month brings carved pumpkins, costume planning, and the perfect excuse to dust off those beloved picture books tucked away in your school library.
While these seasonal stories are often reserved for holiday parties, they're actually treasure troves of learning opportunities. Here are four evidence-based ways to transform your old storybooks into powerful therapy tools.
Target Articulation with Detailed Picture Books
Books like Mercer Mayer's “Happy Halloween, Little Critter” are a goldmine for students working on speech sound development. The complexity approach suggests that targeting more challenging sound combinations can lead to system-wide improvements in phonological patterns. This book, packed with detailed illustrations, delivers targets like spooky, scary, sprinkle, skeleton, and strike for s-blends, plus critter, crawl, growl, and groan for those tricky k/g clusters. Rather than drilling isolated sounds, use the natural context of Little Critter's Halloween adventures to practice these complex targets in meaningful, connected speech.
Build Complex Syntax with Shareable Stories
Byron Barton’s vintage classic, “Hester”, weaves together multiple events on a Halloween day, offering the perfect opportunity for modeling complex sentence structures. The story naturally incorporates temporal and causal conjunctions as Hester goes trick-or-treating when the sun sets, before she hosts her Halloween party, and after she spends time with her friends. Students working on narrative structure and complex syntax can retell Hester's evening using these same conjunctions, building their ability to connect ideas and sequence events. Many seasonal picture books follow this same episodic structure, making them excellent choices for therapy.
Increase Engagement through Social Contingency
Books like "The Little Old Lady Who Wasn't Afraid of Anything" can transform any therapy session into an interactive experience. The repetitive, predictable dialogue ("Two big shoes went CLOMP, CLOMP") creates natural opportunities for choral reading and call-and-response participation. Students who might typically struggle with sustained attention find themselves eagerly anticipating cues for "SHAKE, SHAKE" and "NOD, NOD." This social
contingency—where student responses directly influence the story's progression—keeps even reluctant participants engaged while targeting rhythm, prosody, and turn-taking skills.
Explore Cultural Narratives with Stories like "Bony Legs"
Joanna Cole's retelling of the Baba Yaga legend opens the door to rich cultural discussions that extend beyond Halloween. This Slavic folktale provides a springboard for students to share stories from their own cultural backgrounds. Ask older students to research folktales from their heritage, or invite students to interview their older family members about these legends. These conversations build narrative skills, cultural competency, and critical thinking while honoring the diverse experiences students bring to your therapy room.
A Perfect Potion
The magic happens when we use motivating stories to deliver evidence-based interventions. Whether you're targeting speech patterns, complex syntax, social engagement, or story grammar, books provide the perfect blend of familiarity and motivation that keeps students coming back for more. Happy haunting!
Author: Teadora Taddeo, M.S., CCC-SLP