more than a third of children in the us. uu. enter school unprepared to learn. they lack the vocabulary, sentence structure, and other basic skills required to do well in school. kids who start late usually get left behind: they drop out, they fade out. their lives are in danger.
Why are so many children deficient in the skills that are critical to school readiness?
You are reading: Books used in dialogic reading should have
Children’s experience with books plays an important role. many children enter school with thousands of hours of book experience. their homes contain hundreds of picture books. they see their parents and brothers and sisters reading for pleasure. other children enter school with less than 25 hours of shared book reading. there are few or no children’s books in their homes. his parents and siblings are not readers.
Reading picture books gives children many of the skills that are necessary for school readiness: vocabulary, sound structure, the meaning of print, the structure of stories and language, sustained attention, the pleasure to learn etc preschoolers need food, shelter, love; they also need the food of books.
It’s important to read often with your preschooler. children who are read to three times a week or more do much better in later development than children who are read to less than three times a week. It is important to start reading to your child at an early age. At nine months of age, babies can appreciate books that are interesting to touch or that make sounds.
what is dialogical reading?
How we read to preschoolers is just as important as how often we read to them. the stony brook reading and language project has developed a reading approach for preschoolers that we call dialogic reading.
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When most adults share a book with a preschooler, they read and the child listens. In dialogic reading, the adult helps the child to become the narrator of the story. the adult becomes the listener, the questioner, the audience for the child. no one can learn to play the piano just by listening to someone else play. Similarly, no one can learn to read simply by listening to someone else read. children learn more from books when they are actively involved.
The fundamental reading technique in dialogic reading is the sequence of pairs. this is a brief interaction between a child and the adult. the adult:
- pprompts the child to say something about the book,
- eassesses the child’s response,
- eexpands the child’s response by rephrasing and adding information, and
- rrepeats the message to make sure the child has learned from the expansion .
Imagine that the parent and child are looking at a book page that has a picture of a fire engine. the father says, “what is this?” (the pointer) as he points to the fire truck. child says, truck, and parent follows up with “that’s right (assessment); it’s a red fire truck (expansion); can you say fire truck ?” (the repetition).
Except for the first reading of a book to children, the companion sequences should appear on almost every page. sometimes you can read the words written on the page and then ask the child to say something. For many books, you have to read fewer and fewer of the words written in the book each time you read it. leave more to the child.
how to encourage children
There are five types of cues used in dialogic reading to begin sequences between partners. you can remember these indications with the word crowd.
- ccompletion markers
leave a blank space at the end of a sentence and ask the child to fill it in. they are usually used in rhyming books or books with repetitions. stages. For example, you might say, “I think that would be a brilliant cat. A little chubby but not too ____,” letting the child fill in the blank with the word fat. Completion cues give children information about the structure of language that is critical for later reading.
These are questions about what happened in a book a child has already read. recovery prompts work for almost everything except alphabet books. For example, you could say, “Can you tell me what happened to the little blue engine in this story?” Recall prompts help children understand the plot of the story and describe sequences of events. prompts to remember can be used not only at the end of a book, but also at the beginning of a book when a child has read that book before.
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These prompts focus on the images in the books. they work best for books that have rich, detailed illustrations. For example, while looking at a page in a book the child is familiar with, you might say, “Tell me what’s going on in this picture.” Open-ended prompts help children increase their expressive fluency and pay attention to details.
These prompts often begin with what, where, when, why, and how questions. Like the open prompts, the wh prompts focus on the images in the books. for example, you could say “what is this called?” while pointing to an object in the book. wh questions teach kids new vocabulary.
These ask children to relate the pictures or words in the book they are reading to experiences outside the book. For example, while looking at a book with a picture of animals on a farm, you might say something like, “Remember when we went to the animal park last week? Which of these animals did we see there?” distancing cues help kids bridge the gap between books and the real world, as well as help with verbal fluency, conversational skills, and storytelling skills.
Distancing prompts and reminder prompts are more difficult for children than ending, open, and wh prompts. Frequent use of reminders and distancing should be limited to four- and five-year-olds.
Virtually all children’s books are appropriate for dialogic reading. the best books have rich, detailed pictures or are interesting to your child. always follow your child’s interest when sharing books with your child.
a technique that works
dialogical reading works. children who have been read to dialogically are substantially ahead of children who have been read to traditionally on tests of language development. children can progress several months in just a few weeks of dialogic reading. We’ve found these effects with hundreds of children in areas as geographically different as New York, Tennessee, and Mexico, in settings as varied as homes, preschools, and day care centers, and with children from economic backgrounds ranging from poor to rich.
dialogic reading is just kids and adults having a conversation about a book. Children will enjoy dialogic reading more than traditional reading, as long as you mix prompting with direct reading, vary what you do from reading to reading, and follow the child’s interest. keep it light. don’t pressure children with more prompts than they can happily handle. keep it fun.
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