By: Shareka Bentham, SLT copyright 2010. Shareka Bentham, SLT
This blog post has been reprinted with express permission of the author as it appeared on her blog Easy Speech and Language Ideas
I’ve always loved scrapbooks.
As a child I always enjoyed looking through magazines, cutting out pictures I found interesting, and sticking them in scrapbooks. Even now I have one for dress styles I find in magazines. I’ve also applied this concept to my work with children. Every parent who comes to see me in clinic, at some point has to buy a scrapbook. It doesn’t have to be anything too fancy, just a simple construction paper pad that is durable and has enough space to stick pictures. Most tend to look like this:

We work together in session to stick worksheets, pictures related to the theme, reward stickers, and anything of interest in the scrapbook, then parents get to do it at home with the children as well. It’s great for vocab building, artic/phonology, exp and receptive language, AVT, a bit of everything. For example we may work on:
/s/ in therapy, sticking pictures of /s/ words into the scrapbook after saying them, then the next mission would be to go home and search through magazines and newspapers for other things which may begin with /s/ and sticking them in. Having a page for each sound.
SVO constructions- looking for and sticking in pictures of people doing actions- simple
Feelings (ASD)- Finding pictures of people for a happy, sad, angry, etc. page, talking about why the person might feel that way, then the next page would be a picture of the child with I feel happy, sad, angry when……
Vocab around themes: farm, things around the home etc. (that’s another post soon to come)
Phonological Awareness: cutting out pictures and sticking them on their various ‘syllable pages’
e.g monkey would be stuck on the “2 syllable page.”
Prepositions; pictures depicting on, under, behind, etc.
These are fun and exciting and really works well in eliciting speech and language, both in sessions and at home. The good thing is that you can look through the scrapbook and see what has been covered and what progress has been made. ‘
I have a patient who travels to the US to see another speech therapist every few months and instead of sending a long report on what he has done they carry up the scrapbook, and that gives an even better idea of that is happening in therapy. I’ve also got many preschool teachers on board, and they incorporate the scrapbook into some of their activities.
I took some pictures of one of my favourite scrapbooks today to share with my readers. This little one has a cochlear implant and this is his ‘listening scrapbook’.

Working on the “learning to listen” sounds for transportation.

Learning to listen sounds for animals. Also saying “open” to lift the flap, and ‘bye bye’ to close.

hop with plastic frogs (/p/ input)

Incy Wincy Spider Visuals

Finding family members. His favourite character is Ben 10 so I used this as a motivator. I ask him “where’s mummy” and he lifts the flap to find then says word.

working on parts of the body

Sounds for listening (Ahhh vs brrrrrrm)
I’d encourage any speech therapist/pathologist, EI specialist, teacher, parent to try it, and let me know how it goes 🙂
Featured Author: Shareka Bentham, SLT
From her blog: My name is Shareka Bentham, I’m a Speech and Language therapist (also known as a Speech Pathologist in some countries), working in private practice. I earned my Masters in New Zealand and returned to Barbados to practice. I’m quite a newbie in the field, as this is my first year practising, but I’ve learnt a lot thus far. There aren’t many speech therapists in my country, one working in government, and the remaining 4 or so in private practice catering to a population of approximately 275,000. Needless to say I have a pretty hectic caseload with a range of communicative needs. I work with both paediatric and adult populations with speech, language, social communication voice, fluency, and feeding disorders and my settings range from clinic, hospitals, and house/school visits. I’m also the in-house therapist at one primary school, so yes it gets quite busy.