The Sound Tales Series was created collaboratively between an SLP and an Elementary School Teacher. It was intentionally designed to partner SLP approaches to speech sound disorders and teacher approaches to literacy.

Each book utilizes decodable passages appropriate for K-2nd grade readers. The passage is meant to be read and written by the student as a follow along activity for learning. Depending on the skill level of the student, partner assisted reading, writing or letter tracing may be appropriate for the passage. This offers an encompassing literacy experience that includes phonics, writing, decoding, and phoneme substitution that is sound specific.

The Sound Tales Series is targeting the “Late 8” sounds, which are the last eight developing speech sounds in English (s/z, r, l, th voiced/unvoiced, ch, and sh). They are some of the toughest sounds for students to say, and they are frequent flier sounds in the speech room.

Each book contains direct instruction for articulator placement and manner for sound production. The decodable passage includes four minimal pairs for the target sound, using the most common errors for that sound.

The stories in the Sound Tales Series encourage the characters to use visual feedback to improve accuracy of sound production. They use a mirror to check the placement of the tongue, lips and jaw. It is encouraged that students have a small mirror with them to check their production as well during the reading activity!

Often, children who have speech sound errors with the Late 8 sounds do not get onto the speech therapy caseload early on in elementary school, which is one of the big reasons WHY we wrote The Sound Tales Series. This series can help empower teachers and parents to give effective prompts to young learners having difficulty with articulation, while still engaging in literacy instruction consistent with Science of Reading pillars.