A plethora of children's books use carrier phrases to teach language skills. These are commonly referred to as "repetitive books." The predictable nature of such books allows the child to master the use of the carrier phrase itself and to devote more cognition to the content of the story without having to process more complex sentence structures. Author Eric Carle's books are an effective starting point, as well as books by Dr. Seuss. Your librarian will be able to help you identify additional books that use carrier phrases.
Carrier phrase games are easy to create on your own, and can be played almost anywhere, even in the car. In fact, the well known game "Eye Spy" is a variation of a carrier phrase game. Try starting off with the carrier phrase "I see a..." or "I hear a..." Then move towards the intangible, such as "I want a..." or "I wish I was..." You can also use board games such as "Chutes and Ladders" and "Candyland" by requiring children to use a specific carrier phrase during each turn. For example, "I am in..." or "This is a..." "Simon Says" is another well-known game that uses carrier phrases.
For children who are already writing, you can try using cloze (fill in the blank) writing activities to create poems or short narratives. This can be done at any level. For young students, create a worksheet with several incomplete sentences for students to fill in. As each student shares the finished product with the class, have the class repeat the predictable portion of each sentence out loud before each student shares how they filled in the blank. For more advanced learners, simply adapt the carrier phrases to contain the proper structure and vocabulary for your lesson.
Carrier phrase activities help children develop new speech sounds and learn how to integrate them into longer sentences. They are also a highly effective way to provide the scaffolding for children to practice using longer and more complex sentence structures. Carrier phrases are also used to help people who stutter and who have other common speech disorders because the use of repetition helps to create muscle memory for the mouth and vocal chords.