Story Time

Find time throughout the day to squeeze in story time with your children. Whether its before nap time, before bed time, right after a big meal - make sure that it always happens at the same time in the day. This will help establish a routine and create a predictable structure of activities your child can look forward to.

For children who are working on correspondence and visual schedules, two things:

1. try your best to always call the activity the same name (e.g., story time, time to read a book, book time, anything works)
2. print out or draw an image or write down a word you want to use to symbolize the activity.

When you are ready to introduce the activity, show your children the symbol you are using while verbalizing the name of the activity. Repeated pairings of the image with the spoken label of the activity will teach your children that the picture represents the activity. Once you’ve shown the picture and stated the name of the activity, follow through with doing the activity. Over time, with more pairings of other pictures and their corresponding activities, you can then start to sequence these images to represent a visual schedule. Click here to read more about how to set up visual schedules.

Story time is such a great opportunity to work on language goals. Ask questions about the story. Point to images and characters in the book and ask your children to label them or make comments. Make silly sounds, create a character, have fun with it - make your child laugh and smile. This is one great way to enrich your time with your children while implementing ABA strategies at home.

Don’t have a library of books at home? StoryLine Online has an online catalogue of children’s books read to you by celebrated actors and actresses alongside beautiful animated illustrations.