Today, in therapy, I made an experience book for my six-year-old student. We’re working on possessive pronouns, so I made a bunch of pages with pictures of various people (just random people from a clip art) and various objects. We then matched the objects to the person by color. For example, I printed a picture of a little boy in a green shirt. We wrote “His favorite color is green. It’s his ______” (frog, celery, tree, leaf, etc.). Unbenknownst to him, however, I snuck in pictures of myself (so he could practice saying “your”) and my junior clinician (assigned to observe all of our sessions) (so he could practice saying “her”). I also put in a blank page where he could paste a picture of himself to practice saying “my“.
Not only did this make the activity more relevant to him, the look on his face when he flipped to the page with my silly photo on it was priceless. He stared at if for a while, then looked up at me in disbelief and exclaimed,
“Hey! How did you get in my book!?!”
I could have died laughing! That little guy made my day! (Oh, and PS… the activity worked pretty well, too!)
Elizabeth A. Rosenzweig 