Ahhhh the Old Lady series… who doesn’t love the old lady books? We all reach for for an old lady book whenever we set up a new thematic unit. Why? because kids love it!! We know using an Old Lady book makes it easy to work on many, many skills! What do the kids love about the old lady? Feeding her of course!!!
Whenever we use literature in our therapy, we make sure to incorporate the use of props to go along with the story. One of our favorite props to use with “The Old Lady Who Swallowed…” series is none other than Ned’s Head. Ned’s Head is a popular children’s game in which you pull a variety of gross items out of Ned’s mouth, ears, etc. Grab it off your shelf if you have it, keep your eye out for it to go on sale OR hunt for it at your local thrift store! You only really need the head!
You can turn Ned into the Old Lady by simply adding a hat, wig, etc., you make your story come to life by allowing the kids to actually feed the Old Lady props as they read the story. We gather props and use pictures of the vocabulary each time we use the story in therapy. The pictures can come from the multitude of Old Lady sequencing products on TPT OR you can simply print google images! We use both. You can layer your therapy to include a variety of developmental levels. Using pictures and props allows you to work on early learner goals like imitation, object/object match, picture/picture match, object/picture match, sequencing, auditory memory, object permanence, receptive vocabulary and expressive vocabulary just to name a few, You can target the verb ‘eating’ with each object she eats and of course our Old Lady always says “yummmm yum yum yum yum” and we target motor and speech imitation. For our more advanced language kiddos, this activity lends itself to target thematic vocabulary, functions, features, categories, similarities and differences and of course any articulation sounds that are evident throughout the book.