Reading with your child is one of the most impactful practices you can do in the early years.

Book reading is beneficial for children of all ages, starting from birth. Listening to stories helps children grow their emergent literacy skills even long before they can speak. Research shows that reading aloud to children, ideally daily, supports a love of literacy, advanced language development, and future ability to read independently. Additionally, taking the time to read storybooks aloud together also enhances the parent-child bond and supports a variety of cognitive and social-emotional skills, including critical thinking and emotional resilience.

A few reasons for this host of benefits from reading together is that children learn best when their knowledge is scaffolded by an adult. Scaffolding is when an adult adapts their behavior and the way they give instructions based on the knowledge level of the child. Scaffolding is achieved by first recognizing what your child knows, and then providing incremental challenges to help support their learning.

One research-based technique for scaffolding your child’s learning while reading is known as dialogic reading. Dialogic reading is where an adult and child have a meaningful conversation about a book before, during, and after the book. This goes beyond the typical experience of an adult reading while a child simply listens. Through dialogic reading, children are actively involved in learning how to become the storyteller. The goal of dialogic reading is to have the child increasingly lead the reading experience.

The basic structure of dialogic reading is the acronym PEER:

• Prompt the child to talk about the book.

Parent, pointing to a picture of a dump truck: “Ooh, what is that?”

Child: “A truck!”

• Evaluate the child’s response

Parent: “Yes, a dump truck!”

• Expand upon their response by adding information

Parent: “The dump truck is yellow.”

• Repeat the prompt or word to see what they learned from the new information.

Parent: pointing to the dump truck again “Can you say dump truck?”

Child: “A dump truck!”

There are five types of prompts to try out, which you can remember with the acronym CROWD:

• Completion, fill in the blank type questions

“This is a _______ truck”

• Recall, asking your child to remember or summarize something from the story

“Can you tell me what happened to the dump truck in this story?”

• Open-Ended, focused on the images in the book

“Can you describe what’s going on in this picture?”

• Wh- , asking specific what, where, when, why, and how questions

“What is that called?”

• Distancing, asking your child to connect elements of the story or pictures to their real-life experiences

“This book was about a dump truck! Do you remember when a dump truck came to our house? Did it look like any of the trucks in this book?”

To practice dialogic reading, try reading a new book to your child. Read it once through, while pointing to interesting images and encouraging your child to repeat new words. The next time you read the book, you can scaffold their knowledge by practicing the PEER method. Ask increasingly complex questions about the book. As you read the same book multiple times, you will start to read the words on the pages less as your child engages in conversation around the story more and more. It’s an incredible thing to witness!

A few more ideas for making reading aloud a central and enjoyable practice for the whole family are :

• Create family routines around reading aloud to ensure it is part of your child’s day. Many families choose to incorporate books into the bedtime routine
• Read both fiction and nonfiction books, including different genres, with rich illustrations
• Choose books connected  to your child’s cultural background and ethnicity
• Follow your child’s interests and explore topics that they enjoy through literature
• Pay attention to your child’s behavior while reading and adjust as necessary
• Utilize your local library to access countless options for both board and picture books