EURICH’S
CHIT-CHAT KIDS™

A SPEECH AND LANGUAGE BOOK SERIES FOR CHILDREN

Hi!  Welcome to the wonderful world of the Chit-Chat Kids™! I’m Monique Eurich, MS-CCC/SLP, the author and creator of the Chit-Chat Kids™ book series.

The Chit-Chat Kids™ book series:

• was inspired by children with Apraxia of Speech, a neurologically-based speech disorder that adversely impacts a child’s ability to plan the motor movements needed to produce speech
• was designed to be easy to use, especially for parents working at home with their children
• is suitable for all beginning speakers who want to say it all by themselves!
• targets speech associated with beginning language concepts
• depicts speech production targets written phonologically and hierarchically to allow parents and speech and language pathologists to provide models at each individual child’s starting point, accepting the simplest approximation as representative of the language target. For example, in the first book in the series, “I can SAY the numbers all by myself,” the first targeted word, “one,” produced at its simplest level as “ah,” would be accepted meaningfully to be the word “one.”  In this way, the child can move forward and learn the basic concept of saying the numbers
•  allows the child, parent and speech pathologist to repeat the book with the child at gradually and increasingly more challenging levels of speech production while focusing on expressive language skills
• addresses basic language concepts often missed in children where the primary concern becomes speech production, thereby creating a secondary language delay
• includes a pronunciation key; however, the pronunciation, for the most part, is clearly indicated by the way in which the word is written, phonetically.
• includes a simple “Follow the Rainbow” hierarchy to move from the simplest to more complex representations of speech
• includes “Speech Basics,” a guide to speech therapy vocabulary and approaches. For example, what “target” and “prosody” mean as well as explanations of what modeling speech entails, are provided.  In addition, what it means to accept a child’s approximation to support language learning is defined.

 

Special Thanks to my daughter, Rain Sullivan, the illustrator of all of the Chit-Chat Kids:  Chit, Chat, Babbles, Say-Say, Gabby, Rap & Jabber

More basic concepts speech books are on the way!!!

Next up... "I can SAY the colors, all by myself!"