The Stories of Jack and Theo. How to enhance conversation on mental-state terms through language games

This book contains sixteen stories - specially created for preschool and primary school children - about the adventures of two likeable characters called Jack and Theo, a dolphin and a shark who encounter problems and come up with solutions. The stories display one peculiar feature: they have been intentionally enriched with psychological lexicon, or terms describing the world of inner states, whether physiological, perceptive, emotional, related to volition or to moral judgment. The book contains also the description of a standard procedure protocol. The adult initiates the language game session by repeating a sentence containing the target term to be focused on, drawn from the story that has just been read. This helps the children to relate the activity to a content that they have just heard and therefore to place the language game within a meaningful context. The adult then invites the children to participate in a conversational game, explaining that this “game” consists of using the selected term.