Description

With Simple Tales You’ll Always Have a Story for Therapy

Do you love narrative instruction but need more stories? Do your youngest story-tellers need entry level narratives? Simple Tales was created to solve the pressing need for several stories designed explicitly for narrative instruction. As we SLPs know too well, not many existing stories are easily adapted for children just beginning to dip their toes into narration. A basic five part story still requires a lot language, so Simple Tales keeps the cognitive load manageable for beginners.

 

What are the Tony Simple Tales?

The Tony stories are 10 stories carefully designed for early narrative learning. Each story has five elements (character, problem, feeling, action, resolution) and comes with basic and expanded text for varied levels of narrative instruction. The stories are available in printable PDFs—perfect for online or in person instruction.

 

Fun

The stories are appealing, child centric, and delightfully illustrated. They have all been tested with actual children in a clinic setting and have passed the child approval test.

 

Research-Based

*Research shows narrative instruction has a robust effect on language development. Simple Tales can used with any narrative instruction method. Through story telling children learn to:

• Identify main characters and ideas
• Recall names of characters, places, and times
• Learn names for emotions, including more advanced vocabulary for feelings
• Connect problems with character emotions and actions
• Retell stories with detail
• Use and understand questions, prepositions, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions and more, all within the context of a story.
• Tell stories about their own experiences

 

What makes Simple Tales Unique?

• The number of stories offered is fantastic! Our students need so much repetition and practice with basic narratives it’s a struggle to find enough material, and that’s where Simple Tales shines.
• Suitable for earliest story learners – Elements early learners find difficult to include in a retell, such as dialogue, are kept to a minimum.
• Adaptable —The stories also have enough plot and detail for more advanced story telling.
• Auditory memory – Consistent characters across stories can help students with poor auditory memories recall specific character names. Some of the character names also make use of alliteration, e.g “Danny Dinosaur.”

 

What’s Included?

• 10 stories featuring a boy, Tony
• Storybooks with basic and expanded text for each story
• Personal narrative form
• Story tracker form to record which stories you have used with each student, and when
• Progress monitoring form
• Parent instructions
• SLP instructions

 

Product Details

• These stories don’t introduce complications, as the goal of Simple Tales is to provide therapists with basic stories. However, the basic stories vary in complexity in order to supply stories for every learner. Also, each story comes with two written examples, one very basic and one with more advanced language.
• The use of infinitive “to” (as in “Peter Pig wanted to go for a walk.”) is obligatory is some stories. Infinitive “to” can be quite challenging for some learners, but it is a critical grammatical form for expressing intents and plans. To that end, Simple Tales has stories both with and without obligatory infinitive “to.”
• Every story is printable in three formats 1) with basic pre-written story text, 2) last frame blank for the child’s retelling to be recorded, and 3) flashcard style for sequencing activities.
• If you use a narrative approach such as Story Champs or Story Grammar Marker, you can sketch in the accompanying icons.

 

FAQ

Who is Simple Tales for?

Simple Tales works for children who have just become able to tell a basic story, in addition to children who have more advanced storytelling skills. There is ample opportunity to include settings, descriptions, a wide range of emotions, conjunctions, and prepositional phrases, not to mention infinitive “to.”

 

When Should I Introduce Stories?

Children need to have the ability to sequence events and form basic sentences in order to tell stories.

 

What to do when a child is reluctant to tell stories

Often, a child who is reluctant hasn’t had enough practice with the language of play to feel comfortable narrating. In these cases, it helps to act out stories with toys while the SLP narrates the story. You can also take pictures of the toys in the different parts of the story and practice co-narrating from those pictures. When children can talk freely in play, elements of story telling begin to emerge.

 

* Story Champs, SKILL (Supporting Knowledge in Language and Literacy), and Story Grammar Marker are three narrative instruction methods that have demonstrated the effectiveness of narrative instruction through research.

 

If you’d like to learn more about storytelling, here are some helpful podcasts from The Speech Umbrella.

Where Everybody Knows Your Name, #59

To Infinity and Beyond, #58

Follow the Narrative Road, #46

Permission to Play, #12

Narrative Language Intervention with Douglas Peterson, part 1, #23

Narrative Language Intervention with Douglas Peterson, part 2, #24

The Power of Family Stories, #98

You May Also Like . . .

Simple Tales Series – Tess

Simple Tales Series – Peter Pig

Simple Tales Series – Wanda Witch

Simple Tales Series – Danny Dinosaur

Simple Tales Series – 50 Story Bundle

 

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