Seppi is Sleeping: Book Review and Giveaway

A little while ago Sandy Coleman contacted me via email to tell me about this little book she had written and how she felt that it would be a useful tool for therapy.  As literacy is a matter very dear to my heart I met up with Sandy to discuss her book.  She introduced me to Seppi, the hungry skunk, who goes on a hunt for some food.

Sandy is a passionate volunteer for Shine.  This organisation is an NGO  founded in order to improve the literacy skills of children in Grade 2 and 3.

For more information on this organization click here.

Sandy has been working in schools for 3 years and has a background in teaching and training. Through her exposure to children with articulation difficulties (including her own grandson) she was inspired to create a character to encourage carry-over of speech skills as well as to encourage early readers. Keli Hazelton (Creative Manager at San Diego University) did a beautiful job in illustrating the book.  Her pictures are colourful and emotive and bring Seppi to life.

This book is a lovely addition to any therapy bag. It is suitable for children between the ages of2 and 8 years and  can be used to target a variety of aims. I’ve attached a therapy guide for the book to this blog post for some inspiration. Here are just a few things this book can be used for:

1.      Imitation of environmental sounds:  For the babies who are learning speech it is a good tool to elicit some imitation of funny sounds. Children often learn these kinds of sounds before they even begin to use words. Imitating is an important skill for learning speech sounds. When Seppi is looking for food he sniffs along the ground; make the noise with the child, when he finds the strawberries use an exclamation like “WOW”, when he is eating the strawberries make the eating noise ‘nomnomnom’ and when he finally goes to sleep you can say “shhhh..” and make a snoring noise.

2.      Articulation: This book is full of words that begin with /s/ and this is great practice for our lispers. Therapy to correct a lisp is often a frustrating process, but with the guidance of a speech therapist you can use tasks (like this book) to work on carrying over the correct sound production into everyday situations. For information on lisping see the following links:
      1. What is a lisp at Playing with Words 365
      2. Correcting a Frontal Lisp at Heather's Speech Therapy
      3. My child has a lisp. Should I be concerned? at MommySpeechTherapy  

3.       Vocabulary: This book is a great tool to expand a young reader’s vocabulary. It talks about directionality (north, south, east and west), animals and emotions to name a few topics. Have a look at my therapyguide to the book for some more ideas. 

      I'd like to thank Sandy and Keli for their help and for allowing me to use their creations. 

If you would like to stand the chance to win a copy of the book, all you have to do is leave a comment! I will contact you via email to confirm a postal address. If you would like to order a book or have any great ideas for future projects please feel free to leave those ideas here .