Modifying existing, store bought books is somewhat more tricky than creating your own books. First, you need to start with books that have clearly defined targets in them, that the child recognizes. I have used the following books with success; Clifford the Dog books, Elmo books, Amelia Bedelia books, Brown Bear Brown Bear, and The Happy Little Yellow Box.
With this book, The Happy Little Yellow Box, my student’s favorite color was yellow and he was used to the presentation of yellow targets against a background of black.
This student also played with yellow blocks. In preparation for exposure to the book, I drew a smiley face on various sized yellow blocks and called them “boxes”. We practiced visually locating and touching the large box, then the smaller sized boxes, then two well spaced boxes.
Once my student had enough exposure to real yellow blocks/boxes, I started to show him individual pages with a picture of a yellow box on it. I did this by photocopying the boxes in the real book, cutting out the image and pasting it onto black card stock. Note; I generally use heavy, black, card stock paper, 11″ by 17″ in size.
I presented these individual pages against an All-In-One Board to bring the image up into this student’s field of view. Once he could reach out and touch the yellow box as a short story was told, I added more pages such as the following;
Once the student was good at attending to my simplified, modified version of the book, we were able to move on to the real book using blocking devices to hide any busy, visual clutter on the page. I sometimes would SpotLIGHT the yellow box to redirect my student’s visual attention, if needed.
Strategy To See 