Wild Animals Book by Kaley Hodgson
This book takes little readers on a visual tour of forests, wetlands, mountains, and prairies, introducing animals and objects that are important to many Indigenous cultures. Bears and fish, moon and stars, fall and winter…
Designed to facilitate language development in children aged five and under, the read-aloud text encourages kids to associate the lively illustrations with foundational words and concepts. This book is written especially for Indigenous and bilingual children who are learning how to communicate. This book displays multiple components of language that can be applied to the child’s own language as well as English.
Wild Animals was written by Kaley Hodgson MS. R-SLP, Pediatric Speech-Language Pathologist. Over the last ten years, Kaley has specialized in the area of early intervention, primarily focusing on children aged 0-5. Since 2017, she has worked under The Jordan's Principle Program providing speech and language therapy services for children in several Indigenous communities. This is where the inspiration of the book was born.
Wild Animals was developed as a teaching tool to help encourage further receptive and expressive language skills in young children. The legend included in the book guides the reader in basic speech and language therapy techniques that would be used in a typical therapy session. Unique from a traditional story book, the legend, target words, and specially designed images, allow multiple foundational skills to be taught and used to grow with the child as further development occurs.
Some important concepts that can be found in the book are counting, identification of colours, vocabulary development, and increasing sentence length and structure. This book is suitable for all children whether they are learning language for the first time for an additional one!
Wild Animals is locally written, illustrated, designed and printed in Manitoba, Canada.
