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Articles > In A Story > Party Animals! by Tali Kellerstein
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Party Animals! A Wild Collection of Speech Sound Poems

Book by Tali Kellerstein and Illustrated by Elise Conlin

Support the author by purchasing this book here: https://thespeakboutique.com/collections/our-products

 

Party Animals! A Wild Collection of Speech Sound Poems is a fun read-aloud book of playfully illustrated poems. The book highlights 21 different speech sounds each with a dedicated alliterative/sound loaded poem starring a different party animal.

The captivating illustrations showcase the characters in mini narratives that take place in multitude of settings (e.g Hotel Hippo, Movie Moose etc.) The animal characters were carefully chosen to be interesting enough for older children, but with words that are easy enough to be encouraging for children with emerging speech skills and/or speech sound production difficulties.

Party Animals! end notes present everyday readers with information about speech sounds, such as:

  • How the sounds are made
  • What ages we might expect kids to say specific sounds
  • Ideas to reinforce speech sounds
  • How to use the book to support language and literacy development

 

Articulation and Motor Speech:

The repetitive nature of the poems are designed to facilitate the repetitive practice necessary for motor speech and articulation. For single word repetition, use the finger puppet template to create pencil pointers or finger puppets to practice the animal name, for practice in longer utterances, pair finger puppet/pointer and point to the words on the bingo dauber page.

(e.g. 2 word phrase: “rest raccoon”; or sentences: “Raccoon is on the road.”)

 

Phonemic Awareness:

Phonemic Awareness is an instrumental literacy skill. Use the activity pages to practice:

  • Segmenting syllables
  • Blending sounds
  • Identifying initial sounds

e.g. Blending:  Adult says: What word is “L” “AI” “M”

Child says: lime! And uses bingo dabber to colour the lime on the page. 

 

 

Vocabulary:

Every poem in Party Animals features an array of Tier I and Tier II vocabulary. Use context cues to help decode the meaning of the words. 

Animal Vocabulary: Who are the Characters in the story? Look at real photos of these animals. Where do they live? What are their special features?

 

WH- Questions

 Use the Find the Match activity sheets to practice asking/answering WHO lives WHERE. 

 

 

Grammatical Morphemes

 Use puzzle cards to work on possessive -s. Hippo’s hat, ferret’s fan etc. Students can also use this activity to work on third person -s: Moose needs mitts, canoe goes with kiwi etc. Bonus is that the animal’s items have same first sound as the animal name, so this activity can double as a phonemic awareness activity for initial sound identification/matching.

 

 

No matter what activity you choose, your students will love these Party Animals!