The Benefits of Shared Reading

This month, we’re excited to partner with Nicola’s Books to help them celebrate The Genius of Play! You can find us at Nicola’s for two special edition story times on 9/4 and 9/18, where we’ll be reading great books while we model shared reading skills.

​There is a lot more to sharing a book with your child than the words on the page! Books can be used to help your child develop many different skills, including literacy, vocabulary, social skills, joint attention, receptive language (comprehension of spoken language), and expressive language (the ability to express ideas using a variety of grammatical structures). Snuggling up with a book is also a great opportunity to spend quality time together.

Here are a few quick tips to use at home while you read with your little ones:

• For the youngest readers, give them a job (turn the page, lift the flap) and emphasize rhythm, rhyme, and opportunities for silliness. This helps keep them engaged!
• For preschool and school-aged readers, make sure you pause during reading to ask questions. Here are some examples:
  • What do you think this story is about?
  • What you think is going to happen next?
  • Why do you think the character did that?
  • Look, the character is eating a sandwich. What’s your favorite kind of sandwich?
  • What would you do next?

When your child answers, ask a follow-up question, or add your own comment to what they said. See if you can keep the conversation going for five turns (you - child - you - child - you)! This helps your child to develop their comprehension and abstract language skills like inferencing, predicting, and connecting the content of books to the real world and their lives.

• Paraphrase sentences that include new vocabulary words. This helps your child to develop their vocabulary skills.
  • For example, “‘First John put on his shoes, then he ambled over to the bus stop.’ So after he put on his shoes, he slowly walked over to the bus stop to wait.” 
• Talk about letters, words, and sounds. Talk about the title of the book, and if there’s an illustration of a sign, talk about what the sign says. This helps your child to develop the foundations of life-long literacy. You can try some questions like this:
  • What letter is this? Can you think of any other words that start with this letter?
  • Look, here’s the letter P. What sound does P make?
  • This word is “cat”. What is the first sound in “cat”? What is the last sound?
• Connect a book to play! Try some of these ideas:
  • Reenact a story using dolls or toys
  • Dress up and act out a scene
  • Search for a coloring page matching the book on the internet and color or cut out and glue pictures into your own little book. You can talk about the characters or put the events in order while you do this to develop more abstract language skills!