Parent and Child Shared Reading

You can use books to facilitate a child’s ability to learn language. Sharing a book is an ideal time for having a conversation with your child and can help you to facilitate language development because:

• Looking at books develops concentration and attention span.
• Parents can use modelling, repeating and imitating to help elicit language.
• Repetition is a natural part of reading books.
• A favourite, familiar book reinforces already learned language.

• Hold the book
• Turn the pages
• Choose the book to read and where to read it when possible

• How to hold the book
• When to turn the page
• What direction to turn the page
• That they are helping and doing a good job

Point to the words as you read each one and move your fingers along with the writing. This can help children notice print on the page. When you point to print as you read thy will see where you start reading, what direction you go, and that you are not just looking at the pictures.

You can also talk about print to teach children what the words mean and where they are found.

Say things like:

• Here are some big words that tell me the name of the book (point to the title as you read it)
• These small words tell me who wrote the book (point to the author’s name as you read it)
• This word says “lost” (or any other word)
• I’m going to start reading here and move this way (show them)
• I’m done reading that page, I’m going to read here now (point to the next page)
• This is where the bear says “hello” (point to word in picture)

You can ask your child what they think will happen next or what the story is about before you read it by looking at the pictures. You can also ask them to tell you more about the story by looking at things that happen in the pictures that are not in the print. This helps children think about they story as a story, and not just pictures and pages. Sometimes the pictures show more of the story than the words do.

When they learn to do this, they can start to tell a story using the words as well as pictures to guess at the words they do not know yet.

Say things like:

• Let’s look at the front picture. What do you think the story will be about?
• It says “He eats every bite”. Does it look like he eats every bite in the picture? What do you think really happened?
• What do you think the boy will do next?

Next time we look at three more ways to create reading as a language-learning experience for your child!

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Tags: Parent, Child, Shared, Reading, Language, Speech, Development,