We all know that books are an EXCELLENT means of targeting therapeutic goals and supporting your child's overall development. One of my favorite books to utilize in my speech therapy sessions is Go Dog Go by P. D. Eastman (Beginner Book #20)
In this post, we will review different ways we can use Go Dog Do to target a variety of goals and skills. Whether you are introducing and teaching concepts, reviewing concepts, or testing for understanding, there is so much to learn from this book. Let's get started!
Basic Concepts and Language Comprehension
- Size
Big Dog, Little Dog! This book is full of dogs of various sizes. Help your child point to or label which dog is which size.
- Colors
Each dog, car, and tree are different bright colors to be found or labeled!
- Spatial/prepositions
This book does a wonderful job explicitly modeling a variety of early spatial concepts such as over/under, in/out, above/below, and many more! You can additionally model other concepts due to opportunities provided by the wonderful illustrations.
- Numeracy/quantitative concepts
Some, rest, all, one, none - all of these early number concepts can be targeted. It is especially easy to use this goal to measure comprehension - "Show me ALL the dogs in cars!"
- Superlatives
Big, bigger, biggest - due to all the sizes, colors, and shapes, opportunities to identify superlatives are so plentiful in this book!
- Opposites
Working on opposites has never been easier. Many pages even explicitly state the opposites page to page.
- Negation
"Do you like my hat? I do NOT!" Working on the skill of negation with "no," and "not" presents itself naturally.
- Multi-step directions
Give directions to identify pictures by touching the illustration with 1 step, 2 steps, or multiple. This can assess both the ability to follow directions with more than 1 step and/or the underlying concepts within the directions.
Expressive Language
- Identifying nouns and verbs
The dogs in this book are going on some crazy adventures. There are a variety of verbs to identify or label, as well as different places and items they play with.
- Expanding sentences
If you are working on forming word combinations or short sentences, it's easy to add on to any labels. Dog can become red dog, go dog, dog up. Dog up can become dog goes up the tree!
- Greeting
This book models greeting hi and bye throughout. You can practice greeting alongside the dogs.
Speech
- Targeting /k/ and /g/ sounds
This is one of my FAVORITE tools for assessing carryover/generalization of the /k/ and /g/ sounds due to all the high frequency /k/ and /g/ words you can find in this book.
Sarah Larsen, M.S., CCC-SLP
