Dear Santa

Written by Rod Campbell

For ages 0 to 5

Get this book

Amazon

This book is best for:

conjunctions (so)
labelling (toys)
simple prediciton
speech sounds - /s/

Review

Santa receives a letter and starts to wrap presents for the lucky child, but none of the gifts seem quite right. Until, at last, Santa thinks of the perfect present.

Dear Santa is in a similar vein to Rod Campbell’s best-selling Dear Zoo featuring interactive lift-the-flap illustrations and short repetitive sentences. Kids will have great fun predicting what Santa has wrapped up using the descriptive words as clues (e.g. big, messy, scary), then lifting the flaps to discover what’s inside the package. Dear Santa is loaded with /s/ sounds throughout, making it a brilliant choice for children working on their /s/ sound in words and short phrases. The repetitive sentences also provide a fantastic model for using the conjunction ‘so’ (i.e. “So he wrapped up a….”).

* Special thanks to Di Van der Walt for this book recommendation

For further speech and language targets in Dear Santa, see the list below.

Book Details

Narrative Structure: Action Sequence

Story Plot: Repetitive Tale

Themes:

Christmas
gifts
toys

Speech and Language Targets

Speech Sounds:

/s/ - Santa, send, so, something, messy, Christmas
/s/ blends - special, scary, small
/t/ - too, wrote, kite, trumpet, cat
unvoiced /th/ - thought, something

Grammar:

adjectives (small, big, bouncy, scary, messy, noisy)
conjunctions (so - so he wrapped up a...)
modals (will - "I'll send something else...")
regular past tense (wrapped, wanted)
irregular past tense verbs (wrote, brought)
objective pronouns (me)
subjective pronouns (I, he)
action verbs (open - when opening the flaps)
mental verbs (thought Santa)

Semantics:

labelling (toys)
describing functions of objects
predicting

Questions:

what (what did Santa send?)

Print Awareness:

environmental print (on labels of presents)

Concepts:

descriptive concepts (big, small, noisy, scary, bouncy, messy)

Narrative:

sequencing

Book Info

Published by Pan MacMillan in 2012 (ISBN: 9781447223818)