Reading is one of the best ways to support your child’s language development. Just by listening to a story, your child is exposed to language that helps support learning in a variety of areas, including:
- Pre-literacy/literacy skills
- Vocabulary
- Grammar
- Abstract language
- Sequencing of events
- Narratives
- Descriptive language
- Lessons/messages taught in the story
The best part is, reading doesn’t just provide developmental benefits right now. Research has shown strong correlations between the number of minutes a child spends reading each day and success on standardized tests as they get older.
This means that the time you spend reading with your child when they are three years old will continue to benefit them when they are applying for college. Those kinds of benefits make reading a fantastic investment of your valuable time!
Pro tip: specialists recommend at least 20 minutes of reading per day, but more is always better!
Just sitting down and reading a book is great, and it will provide significant benefits to your child. However, if you want to take the benefits of reading to another level, try some of these tricks that teachers and therapists use the next time you pick up your child’s favorite story.
1. Describe the Illustrations
Images help provide visual supports for the story and make reading a more engaging experience for kids. But if you use them right, the images can add an entirely new learning experience to the process of reading.
There are several ways that you can interact with a story’s illustrations to help promote language development.
Ask your child to identify objects or actions.
As you’re reading, ask your child to find different things in the images.
Example: “Where’s the doggy?” or “Which boy is running?”
If your child isn’t talking yet or has trouble identifying these, model an appropriate response.
Example: point to the targeted object and say “There’s the doggy!” or “This boy is running.”
After you’ve modeled a response, ask the question again so that your child can practice copying what you say and do. You can use hand-over-hand to help your child point to the right image if needed. This will help them make the connection between the image and what’s being said.
Ask your child to name objects, actions, or features.
Identifying images helps your child develop their receptive language, which is their ability to understand what is being said. The counterpart to that is expressive language, which is the ability to use language to communicate.
Targeting expressive language is very similar to the last task, but this time, you’re asking them to tell you what things are. There are three main categories of items for your child to name:
Objects: What is this? “It’s a tree.”
Actions: What’s she doing? “She’s riding her bike.”
Features: What season is it? “It’s winter.” How do you know that? “Because there’s snow on the ground”.
Keep in mind that those are in order of increasing difficulty. It will be easiest for your child to name an object, because there is a direct correlation between the object and word, and the question can be answered accurately with a one-word response.
Naming actions is more difficult for two reasons. First, actions are more abstract, meaning they don’t have the same tangible connections to words that objects do. You can see someone jump, but you can’t touch or hold a jump. Second, actions require the proper tense, and you usually need to use more than one word to provide context.
The hardest things to name are features, like as seasons, time of day, or emotions. Not only are these things abstract, but they are also less likely to be mentioned in the text. This means that your child will have to make inferences based on information not directly stated.
2. Talk about the Text
Alright, so now we’re back to the actual reading part. Just like you can do so much more with illustrations than just look at them, you can engage with the story’s text beyond just reading it.
Keep these ideas in mind as you read, and stop at appropriate places to dive deeper into the text.
Make predictions about what will happen.
At suspenseful moments or when something significant has just happened, stop and ask your child to make a prediction about the rest of the story.
Ask them things like:
- What do you think they’re going to do next?
- How do you think that will make him feel?
- Where do you think they’ll go?
- How do you think they’ll fix the problem?
This one works best with new stories. You can still do it with things you’ve already read, but then it’s more of a comprehension and memory task than a predictions task.
Ask questions about what you’ve read.
As you’re reading, stop periodically to ask a comprehension question about what you just read. These questions can be about the general storyline or about specific details.
Ask questions like:
- Where is the girl going?
- What color is the girl’s hair?
- How many bears live in the house?
- Which porridge did she like best?
Depending on your child’s skill level, you might ask about something that happened in the last few pages, or you may only be able to ask about something that was stated in the last sentence. Either way is okay.
Your child will learn and develop skills most effectively by practicing at their current skill level and slowly increasing the difficulty as they consistently succeed with the level they are at.
3. Review What You Read
After you’ve finished reading the story, break it down into its key pieces. This should include some or all of the following:
- Main character (hero)
- Supporting character(s) (sidekick)
- Antagonist (bad guy)
- Setting (where did the story take place?
- Problem (what went wrong? what was the main character trying to do or solve throughout the story?)
- Solution (what did the character(s) do to fix the problem?)
- Ending (how does the story end?)
- Moral (what did we learn?)
This not only targets comprehension of the story, but also helps your child learn to identify the important details in a larger body of work, learn the basic components of a story, and prepare them to complete the next task we will discuss.
Summarize or retell the story.
After you’ve read the story and identified its main parts, ask your child to retell it. To do this, you could set the book aside and ask your child to tell you the story with as many details as they can remember.
Or, if your child can’t read yet, you can let them “read” you the story, retelling it from memory but using the pictures in the book as cues.
Your child doesn’t need to provide a word-for-word retelling to be successful with this exercise. The main goal is for them to include the key concepts you discussed previously.
If this is difficult for them, ask prompting questions to remind them of important details they may have missed (i.e. Where did this happen? Was anyone else with him?).
If this task becomes easy, set a goal for your child to recall more specific details. Always tell your child before you begin what you’d like them to accomplish.
For example, you might set a goal to include three details in addition to the main storyline, such as the main character’s hair color, what the weather was like, and how the main character felt at the end of the story.
Remember, reading on its own is extremely beneficial, and you don’t have to do all of these every time.
In fact, I don’t recommend doing all of them at once! The best way to keep your child reading is to make it an experience they enjoy, so try not to overload them with too much extra “work” as you go.
But if you pick one or two ideas to incorporate into your reading routines, you should start to see great improvements in your child’s language skills.
What are your child’s favorite books? Let me know in the comments!
