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speech and language teaching concepts for If a T. Rex Crashes Your Birthday Party in speech therapy​ ​
Frequent Speech Sounds:

/t/ initial
/r/ initial
/ks/ final

Themes:

birthday
dinosaur
non-seasonal

Book Details:
Diverse Characters: Yes
Age Recommendation: Early Childhood, Elementary

If a T. Rex Crashes Your Birthday Party

By Jill Esbaum

You never know what will happen when a T. Rex crashes your birthday party. Sure, you’ll be super excited when he turns up at your door. But then he’ll stomp. He’ll ROAR. He’ll look at you as if he’s wondering how you taste with a little mustard. In the end, though, you just may find yourself asking him to come back next year! This delightfully whimsical picture book has a fun twist kids will love.

This cute birthday and dinosaur book can be used in speech therapy to address social/emotional concepts and predicting. It is also great for targeting /t/, /r/ and /ks/ sounds. Discover more of the speech and language teaching concepts for using If a T. Rex Crashes Your Birthday Party in speech therapy below:

Key Teaching Concepts

Narrative Structure:

complete episode

Narrative Concepts:

illustration study​
social/emotional
predicting
verbs (action)​
text features

Social/Emotional:

T. Rex has difficulty handling himself and his emotions at the birthday party. The friends try to include him but things don’t always go to plan and he becomes upset. When the boy has had enough, he gets mad at T. Rex and is probably wishing T. Rex won’t come back next year. When T. Rex hugs him before he leaves, the boy has a change of heart and learns to appreciate their friendship.

Figurative Language:

simile (as big as a school bus)

Grammar:

verbs (action)

Text Features:

italics
capitals
bold text
enlarged text
exclamation marks
change in text color

Predicting:

What do you think would happen if a T. Rex crashed your birthday party?
What should we warn them about?
What do you think will happen when he sees the kids, pops the bouncy castle, his party hat breaks, he doesn’t get to blow out candles or when you want to open your own presents etc.?
What do you think will happen at the end?