If narrative language intervention is one of the pillars of your therapy, then you’re going to love what I have for you. As much as I love teaching narrative language, I always struggled to find enough stories to feed the therapy machine. A couple of years ago, in a somewhat desperate state of mind, I took pencil in hand and drew my own stories, featuring Wanda Witch. My clients loved the Wanda stories, despite my rudimentary drawing.

Wanda Witch was soon followed by the Tony character, then Peter Pig, Tess, and Danny Dinosaur. In all I ended up with 50 stories—more than enough to get me through an entire year of therapy.

Eventually I found an artist who brought my stories to life and now you can have them too! Each character has 10 stories, and they are geared for the earliest story tellers.

Tune into this podcast to learn more about the Simple Tales collection of 50 illustrated stories. This is a tool I use multiple times a day, and all I have to do is hit print. Talk about simple tool for optimal outcomes!

 Helpful Links

 Follow the Narrative Road
Where Everybody Knows Your Name
To Infinity and Beyond
Interview with Doug Petersen part 1
Interview with Doug Petersen part 2

Transcript

Hello, welcome to another episode of the Speech Umbrella Podcast. If you hear a funny sound in the background, it’s because I’m currently on a cruise ship in the Greek Isles and I decided I would record this podcast right now because it’s already fall and I want to get this information out to you just as soon as I can. I don’t know about you, but summer just flew by for me and here it is. It’s fall and if you’re working in a school setting, you’re probably taking a good look at your caseload and your resources and figuring out how to juggle those things. And even if you’re not a school SLP, you still have to consider how best to spend your hard-earned dollars. Sometimes you can’t even find the materials you’d like to have, regardless of how much is in your budget. I like to create products to fill those gaps, because therapy time is just too precious to use materials that don’t really meet our clients needs. That’s really why the speech umbrella even exists to provide SLPs with resources that are precisely tuned to meet individual therapy needs. One of the reasons my summer flew by so quickly is because I’ve been busy getting a new product ready for you. It’s called Simple Tells and it fills a resource gap in our field. It’s a series of stories we can use for narrative intervention, and I want to take you back to the beginning and tell you how it started.

Denise: 1:52 

One crisp fall afternoon, I was preparing therapy for a preschool child. We were working on stories, but I had no new story for her. Having used up my meager store of existing stories, time to invent, as we SLPs so often do With this particular child, we acted out a story before practicing telling it. So I inventoried my props and came up with a witch’s hat and a cauldron. Because Halloween was coming, I took a stab at drawing a witch and she was at least recognizable as a witch, so we could go with that. Thus Wanda Witch was born, and she was a great success with my clients. The Wanda stories were quickly followed by the Tony character stories who drives trucks to satisfy the boy who only wanted to drive trucks on my city rug. Then came Peter Pig, for the child who loves the barn set, followed at last by Tess and Danny Dinosaur and I bet every single one of you has a child who loves dinosaurs.

Denise: 2:48 

I already knew many of my clients struggled to recall character names and this struggle seemed to get them off to a rocky start when they did a retell. I found using multiple stories with the same character really helped with name recall and that is why each character has ten stories and some character names also use alliteration, like Wanda Witch, to help with that recall. The stories became such an integral part of my therapy I dreamed of having them illustrated by a real artist. Sometimes dreams do come true and thanks to the lovely and talented Jocelyn my stories have come to life in a way I never imagined. Now I always have a story on hand and you can too.

Denise: 3:26 

So what is Simple Tells? Simple Tells includes 50 stories carefully designed for early narrative learning. Each story has the five basic elements we’re familiar with character, problem feeling, action and resolution, and each story also comes with a basic written tell and a more expansive written tell for varied levels of narrative instruction. The stories are available in printable PDFs, which is perfect for online or in-person instruction. Simple Tales features five repeating characters, with the option to buy single character packets of 10 stories. So if you don’t want to invest in all 50 tales, but you want a sample of them, you can buy a set of 10 tales about Wanda Witch or 10 tales about Danny Dinosaur and so forth.

Denise: 4:10 

So that’s a little bit about Simple Tales, but now let’s take a deeper dive so I can tell you why Simple Tales is unique, why it fills that gap that we have in our field of resources. So here’s what we’re covering today why Simple Tales is unique, what features allow you to precisely target intervention and what do you get when you purchase it? You might be wondering okay, what makes Simple Tales unique? Because there are some products with basic stories, like Story Champs. While I love Story Champs and I use their method all the time, the product doesn’t have enough stories for day-to-day therapy. They have enough stories for progress monitoring. By the way, if you want to learn more about the benefits of narrative language, check out my two podcasts with Doug Peterson, one of the creators of Story Champs, and I’ll link those episodes in the show notes.

Denise: 4:55 

Simple Tales is unique number one because there are 50 stories. That is a boatload of stories. It’s enough for an entire year of weekly therapy. Plus, I found you can do a second year with more advanced retellings if your kiddo still needs to work on this kind of storytelling. Enough time is passed by by the time you get through all 50 stories that you can circle back around without your clients getting bored, and there is not another story product available with this amount of stories that I’m aware of. But that’s not all.

Denise: 5:25 

Another way Simple Tales is both unique and perfect for precision tailoring to each client is in the use of recurring characters, as I talked about earlier. I noticed a lot of my clients struggling with name recall and I reasoned that if they could tell multiple stories with a single main character, they would be able to remember that name and once they had that name firmly in mind, we could switch characters and they could learn a new character name and finally they could learn to switch between character names. And I tell you it absolutely works. It’s very rewarding to see my kiddos gain confidence in recalling names and that helps them with confidence just through the whole story, because at the very beginning you need to know who you’re talking about and they’re not fumbling over. I don’t know who that character is and then they try and say he, and they try and say she and they’re still maybe confused about pronouns and then the thing kind of falls apart at the beginning. So this recurring character method really works and it spills over into other areas of their life. So many of my clients have struggled to tell me their teacher’s name or their classmates names and I feel this has a real and detrimental effect on peer relationships, because when you don’t know someone’s name you have a certain fuzziness about them and perhaps a hesitation to engage with them. The five characters in Simple Tales seem to offer enough practice in name call to really help in this area. And, by the way, I found pairing phonological awareness and auditory memory tasks with narrative therapy provides a powerful tool when word recall is an issue.

Denise: 6:55 

Another reason Simple Tales is unique is they have been developed for the earliest storytellers, the ones who have just figured out how to sequence steps and put basic sentences together. Check out my episode, follow the Narrative Road. If you need help getting your clients to this point, simple Tales can take your clients from the beginning of storytelling to the point where they are ready to move to stories. With complications, elements that can confuse beginners, such as dialogue, or problems that take a lot of language to describe, have been kept to a minimum. You’ll find some dialogue and some variation in the amount of language needed, and I did that in order to have stories for a variety of starting, but the beauty of them is that the complexity can be ramped up as needed with advanced retellings. I really haven’t found another product out there with stories at this beginning level.

Denise: 7:49 

Another unique feature is the inclusion of stories that can be used to teach infinitive to. If you’re not familiar with this term, well, neither was I until I looked it up, despite having been an SLP for many, many years. Despite having been an SLP for many, many years, infinitive to is the use of the word to, that’s T-O combined with a verb to express intent, as in to eat, to sleep, to teach, etc. It is a very important grammatical function for expressing intent, and so many language-impaired children need explicit instruction in order to learn it. Your clients may need to learn early infinitives before including infinitive two in stories. So that’s something to be aware of. Early infinitives are those words like gonna, wanna, have to, and they’re a normal developmental step as a child develops language. So they’re probably not going to be able to tell a story with infinitive two until they have that in their conversation. That is one thing I work on and check to make sure they have that before I introduce a story with an infinitive two. But be prepared to be amazed at the language leaps that happen once a child learns infinitive two. It’s hard to understand why I didn’t learn about them in grad school. Check out my episode to infinity and beyond for more on Infinitive 2.

Denise: 9:04 

Now, moving on to what’s included with this product Simple Tells. First of all, as I said before, you can purchase all 50 stories at once or you can buy a set of 10 stories featuring one character. All purchases come with two versions of each story, one basic and one more advanced. You also get a progress monitoring form, a story tracker, so you know what stories you’ve done with each client and when. And you get parent instructions. I should say you get instructions for the parent. I’ve written specifically for parents to be able to understand how to tell stories with their children. Finally, each story is printable in three formats. One has a blank frame for writing the story as the child told it, so then you can send it home and the parent knows how the child retold the story. One has the basic text written out, and one format is flashcard style so that you can do a sequencing or a bookmaking activity. My clients absolutely love to make little books by gluing one illustration per page while I write the words in as they tell it, and they also like to illustrate the title page, and they are pretty creative at coming up with their own titles. When I asked them what would you call this story, I can see the wheels turning in their heads and, based on their answers, I know they have been synthesizing or summarizing the content of story in their minds by the title they came up with. So that is really great. There you have it.

Denise: 10:26 

Admittedly, this entire podcast is an advertisement for Simple Tells, but this is one purchase you won’t regret. I use it constantly and while I love so many features, my favorite one is I always have a story on hand for therapy. Now just let me tell you what my starting price is. My launch price for these stories is $20 for a single set, $20 for 10 stories, so $2 per story, and then if you want to buy the whole package, it’s $100 for all five sets. Now that may seem like a lot, but if you think about this, this is a product you can use the whole year, or maybe even two years, depending on your clients. With multiple clients, I use this constantly. I’m always printing these stories out and the parents tell me that the kids love these stories. They take them home, they keep them, they reread them with their parents, especially when they’ve made that little storybook I told you my favorite part of this product is I always have a story on hand. But also because I do a lot of narrative instruction, my prep time is minimal, my results are maximized and I have to say that’s another favorite feature of this product. I mean, the stories are just there. You hit print, comes out the printer, you’ve got your therapy session, or most of your therapy session, planned. This product checks all the boxes. For my motto in simple tools, we got simple tools, optimal outcomes.

Denise: 11:47 

Here’s a story about one of my clients who had been with me a long time and we were doing stories. He was actually working on articulation along with the stories. And what is so cool is he was a K and G S blend kiddo you guys know how frequent that is, and these stories really lend themselves to working on K and G and S blends in the conversation setting, which a story is a conversation setting. So it was perfect for him. And he came bouncing in one day and he said do you have another story for me today? And, by the way, he said that crystal clear, which would not have been possible a couple months ago. So these stories just put the cherry on the top for him. I did a lot of other techniques, articulation wise, to get him to that point, but by using these stories he really, really fine-tuned his language. Where he was saying really, really complex things, he was using relative clauses, for heaven’s sakes, and his articulation just blossomed. And that, to me, is awesome.

Denise: 12:47 

When he came bouncing in and just asked me for another story and that can happen to you too this is a product that is totally worth the price. In fact, I think it’s a steal at this price, honestly, but I know what budgets are. So here we are. This is my launch price To get this awesome product. Go to thespeechumbrellacom slash simple, tells and you’ll find them all. You’ll find them in the 50-pack bundle and you’ll find them in their individual 10-pack sets. You can also find them on TPT Search for the Speech Umbrella to find my store. I love to hear stories about therapy progress, especially your stories, so give me feedback about how these stories work for you. Email me at denise at the speech umbrellacom, and let’s talk. Thanks for listening and we’ll talk to you later.

Dan: 13:34 

Thanks for listening to the speech umbrella. We invite you to sign up for the free resource library at the speech umbrellacom. You’ll get access to some of Denise’s best tracking tools, mindfulness activities and other great resources to take your therapy to the next level. All this is for free at thespeechumbrellacom. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, subscribe and please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and other podcast directories. Thank you.