Art Play Project: Social play, creating stories with playdoh

I have decided to experiment with incorporating social stories into art projects. You can view some information from various websites like, what are social stories by Carol Gray. You can view her website The Gray Center with links to purchase products. But you can also find a few free samples stories to play with. I have not ventured into using the concept of the social story to create a social dynamic to reference but to enhance speech that is appropriate for social interaction. Hope this makes sense to you all! Book image above is from musickit.com, the original book I have was a song by tom Glazer and Illustrations by Rob Barber, Goodyear Books, Harper Collins Publisher.


For example:
Art Play Project: Playdoh and the book "On Top of Spaghetti"
We begin by making spaghetti, meatballs and cheese with the clay and create the props to act out the story/song for "On Top of Spaghetti" song book. After and during the project I write a simple story, that we read together to document the activity. I was thinking of also taking photos for visual reference. Here is a simple story.

"My name is -------. I am playing with Playdoh with my mommy. I like playdoh. My favorite color is -------. We are reading the book on top of spaghetti. I am making spaghetti with the spaghetti maker. We push and push and push the red playdoh in the maker . Help me. We made spaghetti. Yeah. "

I am finding that incorporating stories has helped to encourage familiar speech, fill in the blanks, and expanding spontaneous appropriate phrases. I have to purchase a simple photo printer for on the spot printing of images. Will post more when this happens as I think the visual cue will be an interesting dynamic to retell the story and add more to the story as we progress.
There seems to be a real lack of toys that can simulate these types of interactions for practicing fluid spontaneous back and forth speech. Any ideas or suggestions out there?
I also have found a link to a boyscout page that has the classic song. On Top of Spaghetti.

jax chachitz

Richard Scary's Biggest Word Book Ever

Thanks for the suggestion by ngonz from the Autism Speaks Community Bulletin Board.

"The one thing that I recall helped my son tremendously and lead to a communcation break-through with him: Richard Scarry's Biggest Word Book Ever. Using this book, he finally realized that words had meaning and that things had names. After that, he wanted to learn the names of everything. This book is packed with lots of stuff going on--really fun visuals."

Brown Bear by Eric Carle and Bill Martin

Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you see? by Bill Martin and Eric Carle. This book has a fabulous sing song approach for encouraging speech and pattern. This book was incredibly helpful in many ways, memory, identifying animals, generalizing simple illustrated images, pointing. Eric Carle has created a fabulous illustrated series of books for children. Well loved, well worn.
Eric Carle's website also has a link to valuable suggested activities from various classroom teachers. I love reviewing suggested ideas and modifying it for my own use to help expand concepts beyond just reading a book. brown bear activities
Visit www.ericcarle.com