Simple Tales Story Product In Here!

Join me as we explore the many topics that fall under our umbrellas as SLPs . I want to make your journey smoother . I found the best therapy comes from employing simple techniques with a generous helping of mindfulness . Hello , welcome to another episode of the Speech Umbrella Podcast .

If you hear a funny sound in the background , it's because I'm currently on a cruise ship in the Greek Isles and I decided I would record this podcast right now because it's already fall and I want to get this information out to you just as soon as I can . I don't know about you , but summer just flew by for me and here it is .

It's fall and if you're working in a school setting , you're probably taking a good look at your caseload and your resources and figuring out how to juggle those things . And even if you're not a school SLP , you still have to consider how best to spend your hard-earned dollars .

Sometimes you can't even find the materials you'd like to have , regardless of how much is in your budget . I like to create products to fill those gaps , because therapy time is just too precious to use materials that don't really meet our clients needs .

That's really why the speech umbrella even exists to provide SLPs with resources that are precisely tuned to meet individual therapy needs . One of the reasons my summer flew by so quickly is because I've been busy getting a new product ready for you . It's called Simple Tells and it fills a resource gap in our field .

It's a series of stories we can use for narrative intervention , and I want to take you back to the beginning and tell you how it started . One crisp fall afternoon , I was preparing therapy for a preschool child . We were working on stories , but I had no new story for her .

Having used up my meager store of existing stories , time to invent , as we SLPs so often do With this particular child , we acted out a story before practicing telling it . So I inventoried my props and came up with a witch's hat and a cauldron .

Because Halloween was coming , I took a stab at drawing a witch and she was at least recognizable as a witch , so we could go with that . Thus Wanda Witch was born , and she was a great success with my clients .

The Wanda stories were quickly followed by the Tony character stories who drives trucks to satisfy the boy who only wanted to drive trucks on my city rug . Then came Peter Pig , for the child who loves the barn set , followed at last by Tess and Danny Dinosaur and I bet every single one of you has a child who loves dinosaurs .

I already knew many of my clients struggled to recall character names and this struggle seemed to get them off to a rocky start when they did a retell .

I found using multiple stories with the same character really helped with name recall and that is why each character has ten stories and some character names also use alliteration , like Wanda Witch , to help with that recall . The stories became such an integral part of my therapy I dreamed of having them illustrated by a real artist .

Sometimes dreams do come true and thanks to the lovely and talented Jocelyn my stories have come to life in a way I never imagined . Now I always have a story on hand and you can too . So what is Simple Tells ? Simple Tells includes 50 stories carefully designed for early narrative learning .

Each story has the five basic elements we're familiar with character , problem feeling , action and resolution , and each story also comes with a basic written tell and a more expansive written tell for varied levels of narrative instruction . The stories are available in printable PDFs , which is perfect for online or in-person instruction .

Simple Tales features five repeating characters , with the option to buy single character packets of 10 stories . So if you don't want to invest in all 50 tales , but you want a sample of them , you can buy a set of 10 tales about Wanda Witch or 10 tales about Danny Dinosaur and so forth .

So that's a little bit about Simple Tales , but now let's take a deeper dive so I can tell you why Simple Tales is unique , why it fills that gap that we have in our field of resources . So here's what we're covering today why Simple Tales is unique , what features allow you to precisely target intervention and what do you get when you purchase it ?

You might be wondering okay , what makes Simple Tales unique ? Because there are some products with basic stories , like Story Champs . While I love Story Champs and I use their method all the time , the product doesn't have enough stories for day-to-day therapy . They have enough stories for progress monitoring .

By the way , if you want to learn more about the benefits of narrative language , check out my two podcasts with Doug Peterson , one of the creators of Story Champs , and I'll link those episodes in the show notes . Simple Tales is unique number one because there are 50 stories . That is a boatload of stories . It's enough for an entire year of weekly therapy .

Plus , I found you can do a second year with more advanced retellings if your kiddo still needs to work on this kind of storytelling .

Enough time is passed by by the time you get through all 50 stories that you can circle back around without your clients getting bored , and there is not another story product available with this amount of stories that I'm aware of . But that's not all .

Another way Simple Tales is both unique and perfect for precision tailoring to each client is in the use of recurring characters , as I talked about earlier .

I noticed a lot of my clients struggling with name recall and I reasoned that if they could tell multiple stories with a single main character , they would be able to remember that name and once they had that name firmly in mind , we could switch characters and they could learn a new character name and finally they could learn to switch between character names .

And I tell you it absolutely works . It's very rewarding to see my kiddos gain confidence in recalling names and that helps them with confidence just through the whole story , because at the very beginning you need to know who you're talking about and they're not fumbling over .

I don't know who that character is and then they try and say he , and they try and say she and they're still maybe confused about pronouns and then the thing kind of falls apart at the beginning . So this recurring character method really works and it spills over into other areas of their life .

So many of my clients have struggled to tell me their teacher's name or their classmates names and I feel this has a real and detrimental effect on peer relationships , because when you don't know someone's name you have a certain fuzziness about them and perhaps a hesitation to engage with them .

The five characters in Simple Tales seem to offer enough practice in name call to really help in this area . And , by the way , I found pairing phonological awareness and auditory memory tasks with narrative therapy provides a powerful tool when word recall is an issue .

Another reason Simple Tales is unique is they have been developed for the earliest storytellers , the ones who have just figured out how to sequence steps and put basic sentences together . Check out my episode , follow the Narrative Road .

If you need help getting your clients to this point , simple Tales can take your clients from the beginning of storytelling to the point where they are ready to move to stories . With complications , elements that can confuse beginners , such as dialogue , or problems that take a lot of language to describe , have been kept to a minimum .

You'll find some dialogue and some variation in the amount of language needed , and I did that in order to have stories for a variety of starting , but the beauty of them is that the complexity can be ramped up as needed with advanced retellings . I really haven't found another product out there with stories at this beginning level .

Another unique feature is the inclusion of stories that can be used to teach infinitive to . If you're not familiar with this term , well , neither was I until I looked it up , despite having been an SLP for many , many years .

Despite having been an SLP for many , many years , infinitive to is the use of the word to , that's T-O combined with a verb to express intent , as in to eat , to sleep , to teach , etc . It is a very important grammatical function for expressing intent , and so many language-impaired children need explicit instruction in order to learn it .

Your clients may need to learn early infinitives before including infinitive two in stories . So that's something to be aware of . Early infinitives are those words like gonna , wanna , have to , and they're a normal developmental step as a child develops language .

So they're probably not going to be able to tell a story with infinitive two until they have that in their conversation . That is one thing I work on and check to make sure they have that before I introduce a story with an infinitive two . But be prepared to be amazed at the language leaps that happen once a child learns infinitive two .

It's hard to understand why I didn't learn about them in grad school . Check out my episode to infinity and beyond for more on Infinitive 2 . Now , moving on to what's included with this product Simple Tells . First of all , as I said before , you can purchase all 50 stories at once or you can buy a set of 10 stories featuring one character .

All purchases come with two versions of each story , one basic and one more advanced . You also get a progress monitoring form , a story tracker , so you know what stories you've done with each client and when . And you get parent instructions . I should say you get instructions for the parent .

I've written specifically for parents to be able to understand how to tell stories with their children . Finally , each story is printable in three formats . One has a blank frame for writing the story as the child told it , so then you can send it home and the parent knows how the child retold the story .

One has the basic text written out , and one format is flashcard style so that you can do a sequencing or a bookmaking activity .

My clients absolutely love to make little books by gluing one illustration per page while I write the words in as they tell it , and they also like to illustrate the title page , and they are pretty creative at coming up with their own titles .

When I asked them what would you call this story , I can see the wheels turning in their heads and , based on their answers , I know they have been synthesizing or summarizing the content of story in their minds by the title they came up with . So that is really great . There you have it .

Admittedly , this entire podcast is an advertisement for Simple Tells , but this is one purchase you won't regret . I use it constantly and while I love so many features , my favorite one is I always have a story on hand for therapy . Now just let me tell you what my starting price is .

My launch price for these stories is $20 for a single set , $20 for 10 stories , so $2 per story , and then if you want to buy the whole package , it's $100 for all five sets . Now that may seem like a lot , but if you think about this , this is a product you can use the whole year , or maybe even two years , depending on your clients .

With multiple clients , I use this constantly . I'm always printing these stories out and the parents tell me that the kids love these stories . They take them home , they keep them , they reread them with their parents , especially when they've made that little storybook I told you my favorite part of this product is I always have a story on hand .

But also because I do a lot of narrative instruction , my prep time is minimal , my results are maximized and I have to say that's another favorite feature of this product . I mean , the stories are just there . You hit print , comes out the printer , you've got your therapy session , or most of your therapy session , planned . This product checks all the boxes .

For my motto in simple tools , we got simple tools , optimal outcomes . Here's a story about one of my clients who had been with me a long time and we were doing stories . He was actually working on articulation along with the stories .

And what is so cool is he was a K and G S blend kiddo you guys know how frequent that is , and these stories really lend themselves to working on K and G and S blends in the conversation setting , which a story is a conversation setting . So it was perfect for him . And he came bouncing in one day and he said do you have another story for me today ?

And , by the way , he said that crystal clear , which would not have been possible a couple months ago . So these stories just put the cherry on the top for him . I did a lot of other techniques , articulation wise , to get him to that point , but by using these stories he really , really fine-tuned his language .

Where he was saying really , really complex things , he was using relative clauses , for heaven's sakes , and his articulation just blossomed . And that , to me , is awesome . When he came bouncing in and just asked me for another story and that can happen to you too this is a product that is totally worth the price .

In fact , I think it's a steal at this price , honestly , but I know what budgets are . So here we are . This is my launch price To get this awesome product . Go to thespeechumbrellacom slash simple , tells and you'll find them all . You'll find them in the 50-pack bundle and you'll find them in their individual 10-pack sets .

You can also find them on TPT Search for the Speech Umbrella to find my store . I love to hear stories about therapy progress , especially your stories , so give me feedback about how these stories work for you . Email me at denise at the speech umbrellacom , and let's talk . Thanks for listening and we'll talk to you later .

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