The Kiss That Missed

I love shopping at Amazon for books, but honestly, there are still few things I enjoy as much as a Friday night at my local Barnes and Noble.  You can frequently find me sitting in the children's section on the mini-stage they have set up for book readings, holding my coffee from their in-house Starbucks (of course, I am always drinking Starbucks!), with a stack of picture books ready to devour.

Now, being a public-school SLP, my budget is tight, limited, basically nil.  But I so enjoy using picture books in therapy, and I get way too excited each "season/holiday" when my local store puts out paperback book collections about the current season/holiday theme. Paperback is so much cheaper than hardback ones, and they only seem to come out during these times.  Pair that with my educator's discount card to get my 20% off, and the books become somewhat more affordable.  I truly get my GEEK on, and this past Friday I found a really cute one to share before Valentine's Day.

In a nutshell, a busy king blows his son the prince a kiss that misses his check and floats off in to a dark and scary forest.  The king dispatches a knight to track down the kiss, and thus, a funny journey begins.

As you can see from this sample page, this is a great book for story sequencing and retell.  I also love it for my students working on synonyms, descriptive words, compare and contrast (how are a prince/king alike/different?, a house/castle?, etc.), wh- questions, predicting, cause and effect, why questions, etc.  I get so much done with a great picture book that often it takes the entire session.  I think it would pair nicely with a quick Hershey kisses game (grab a bag of the Valentine colored Hershey Kisses, write a number on the bottom of each one, put on the table, and have the kids pick one after practicing their speech skills and that becomes their number of points and the one with the most points at the end of the game wins, or pick one before they practice to know how many times they are to practice their skills).  This quick five-minute game is a nice way to end the last few minutes of the session after enjoying a really good book. 

What are some of your favorite books to read on Valentine's Day?