Expanding Receptive and Expressive Skills Through Stories (EXPRESS)

Book excerpt: EXPanding Receptive and Expressive Skills through Stories (EXPRESS): Language Formulation in Children with Selective Mutism and Other Communication Needs is a resource that provides a treatment approach for speech-language pathologists, teachers, psychologists, parents, and others working with children with selective mutism and other language delays or disorders such as language learning disabilities, autism spectrum disorders, or for children learning English as a second language. It is a program for expanding receptive and expressive language skills with five levels of communication to accommodate children from nonvocal stages through spontaneous vocalization. The EXPRESS approach includes activity modules corresponding to classic children's stories. Children's literature is used as a flexible and adaptable tool for presenting activities designed to help expand vocabulary and grammar, engage in question-answer routines, improve sentence formulation, and generate narrative language. Creativity and imagination are also fostered using sentence formulation and story generation. EXPRESS supports the Common Core State Standards for English and Language Arts. Each of the modules requires the corresponding storybook that can be obtained individually or found within The 20th Century Children's Book Treasury, a compendium that includes all the stories. EXPRESS requires the use of classic children's stories to complete the activity modules. The stories can be obtained individually, through an inclusive compendium, or through online videos. To obtain each storybook individually, contact your preferred library or bookseller.The 20th Century Children's Book Treasury (ISBN-13: 978-0679886471) is a compendium that includes all the stories. It can be purchased through your preferred bookseller (such as Amazon) or the publisher (Penguin Random House).Disclaimer: At the time of publication all information and links are accurate. Plural Publishing, Inc. cannot further guarantee the availability of the stories or video links.