Q: How do fireflies start a race?

A: Ready, set, glow!

Kids love jokes--and teachers and SLPs love fast and easy ways to improve students' phonological awareness. That's why every elementary and middle-school SLP and educator needs this playful, effective activity book, packed with jokes and riddles that increase students' awareness of the phonemes that make up words. The perfect way to avoid "drill and kill" instruction while still giving children the strong foundation they need to be successful readers, Sounds Like Fun

• Enhances the literacy skills children need for academic success, including phonological awareness, comprehension, thinking skills, spelling, and vocabulary
• Uses humor as an effective learning tool. Laughter and learning go hand in hand with kid-friendly jokes and riddles, sure to keep students engaged and interested in words
• Helps older students work on phonological awareness skills, going beyond the many resources geared toward younger children
• Takes just 15-20 minutes per lesson. Includes quick classroom warm-ups and brief activities that can be worked into any existing curriculum
• Requires no extra training or materials--any teacher can pick up the book and start using the jokes and activities right away
• Works with all students, including children with learning disabilities, struggling readers, and English language learners
• Is ideal for whole-group or one-to-one sessions--teachers can use the lessons they want, however they want to use them

Complete with clear instructions and helpful appendices of consonant and vowel sounds, this activity book is a simple, cost-effective, and reliable way to make learning key literacy skills fun for the whole class. A must for the "teaching toolbox" of every special educator, general educator, and speech pathologist!

Improve students' skills with:

• Warm-up Activities that improve awareness of how phoneme changes affect the meaning of words
• Phonological Humor Activities, grouped into units such as Take Away a Consonant Sound, Change a Consonant Sound, and Change a Vowel Sound
• Challenge Activities, more complex phonological humor challenges that sharpen students' thinking skills
• Review and Reflection Tasks to make sure students understand what they've learned and apply their new knowledge in different contexts
• Additional Activities that group together the kinds of activities that appear throughout the previous 5 units of the book

Cecile Cyrul Spector, Ph.D., has worked in the field of speech-language pathology for more than 35 years. She received her Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees from Brooklyn College, New York, and her doctoral degree from New York University. She started her career by providing clinical services in public schools, in private practice, and at the Hofstra University clinic. Eventually, she joined the faculty of Long Island University-Orangeburg Campus, where for 10 years she taught a wide range of courses and was the director of the speech-language department. She also taught at Montclair State University and New York University. Cecile has made numerous research presentations and given workshops that have focused on various aspects of humor, ambiguity, figurative language, inferencing, and phonological awareness. Most of her journal articles have been on this same subject matter.

As a clinician, Cecile has worked with individuals from 18 months to 80-plus years. Adolescents with language-related learning disabilities and adults who incurred brain injury as a result of strokes or accidents were the populations that sparked her interest in the subtleties of abstract language and cognition. Cecile's previous publications include Just for Laughs: A Game to Improve Language Skills Using Humor (Communication Skill Builders, 1995); Saying One Thing, Meaning Another: Activities for Clarifying Ambiguous Language (Thinking Publications, 1997); Between the Lines: Enhancing Inferencing Skills (Thinking Publications, 2006); and Sounds Like Fun: Activities for Developing Phonological Awareness, Revised Edition (Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co., 2009).