Kids l love water so a story about splashing in puddles is the perfect spring book for a speech therapy lesson.
Puddles, by Jonathan London is all about having fun exploring after a thunderstorm and definitely NOT staying dry!
This book can be used with students
-to study poetry–“All night the slash, of rain and the flash, of lightning, and the Ka-BOOM! of thunder rattling…
-to discuss figurative language: “like a curtain rising on a shiny new day of brightness and blue… or “A sky wiped clean of the last cloud.” When explaining this last phrase, we actually took our arms and wiped the sky clean. The fun part was that I read this to two groups of kids, ironically the day after a night of rain. They could really relate to the sky wiped clean of clouds the day after. “Puddles…pieces of sky on the ground.” What a lovely word picture of a puzzle. I asked my students, “How is a puddle a piece of the sky?” Rain of course! “Worms leave trails in the mucky mud “like sloppy writing–they’re learning the ABCs of weather…” What letter does the trail look like? Are they really learning their ABC’s?
-to work on description, sequencing and re-telling the story. Puddles has cute, clear illustrations of puddle jumping, getting wet, looking at your reflection in the pond, slogging through wet grass and arriving home. Of course once they hop in the tub, get warmed up and dry, they head out the door with their boots on again!
