I have a bad case of “I want summer break to come” and have needed extra help from Starbuck’s to get me through the week.  This past week I have been using two of my favorite “beach themed” books in therapy.  Reading these books with my students has increased my longing to sit beach side soaking up the sun and reading a good book.  I hope my family can make a couple trips out to the ocean this summer.

Beach Day By Karen Roosa is a great book because you can adapt it to fit the needs of your students.  I love the vivid pictures in the book and each page is filled with people doing lots of different activities such as building sand castles, playing baseball, looking for sea shells, reading a book, taking a nap and munchin’ on some good grub!  We can work on present progressive verb tenses, answering “what are they doing questions”, association words and describing people by attributes.  With my articulation kids, I quickly read them the story and then have them draw a beach scene filled with activities and items they would want to bring to the beach.  I encourage them to think of items that have their target sound.  Then, they have to describe the picture using their BEST speech!

To help with my extension lessons, I made some visuals of all things associated with going to the beach for my students who need pictures and can only answer receptively.  We also used these visuals to work on noun function and describing by attribute.  You can grab those visuals by clicking on the PHOTO!

 All You Need for a Beach By Alice Schertle and Barbara Lavallee is another great book that is fun to read with your students because it talks about all the things you need to make a beach.  As I read with the students, we talk about what we think will be next to come for the beach.  This book also has great pictures and we are able to talk about what we would bring to the beach and why we would bring those things!  I love using books because they have great visuals (less planning), wonderful vocabulary, and you can adapt activities from the book to meet your kids needs.  I definitely recommend these books for your summer/beach theme collection!  What activities do you use for a summer theme?