Reading With a Child: Strategies

                                     

There are many things you can do when you read with a child. Reading isn't just about reading, it can be about engagement, critical thinking skills and so much more! Engaging in different ways can help to make reading fun and interesting. This helps to promote the love of books.  

Here are just a couple examples:

Look at the Cover

By looking at the picture and words on a book cover you can explore what a book is going to be about. This is a was to engage your listener or reader before you even open the first page. 

Predicting:

This can begin even by just looking at the cover. You can ask the child, "what do you think might happen next?" This is a good opportunity to share and compare thoughts on the future pages of the book. You can use images and text to help support your predictions. This is a fun way to interact with the child throughout your story reading experience.

Inferring:

This is when we can look at what is happening more deeply in the story. We can ask questions like: "Why do you think the character is sad?" We can look for hidden clues in the text and images to guide our analysis of the story. This is a great time to also work on our own personal reflections. If we get a response like, "I think he is say because his face has a frown" we have an opportunity to dig a little deeper and ask follow up questions like "Why do you think that." The child may respond, "when I am sad that's what my face looks like." This can go into a much deeper level and you can discuss schema's and how it influences our thinking. We can find out if what we think is right or wrong and analyzes why that may be.  Most importantly we can using these discussions to make connections between books and other books or the real world.