5 Ways to Make Reading a Book a Language Rich Activity

Reading to your child is one of the easiest ways to foster a lifelong love of learning and reading. From an early age, reading helps you and your child to bond, and also introduces new vocabulary and correct grammar. Our pediatrician recommended 30 minutes of reading each day when C was only 6 months old. It’s SO important! Something this simple can easily be turned into an activity to help model and improve your child’s speech and language skills. Here are 5 simple things that you can do to make the most out of your reading time.

1. Talk about the pictures

Talking about the pictures can help with practicing every other skill in this post! :) If your child is verbal, ask them what they see in the picture. Then, build up their utterance by adding one more word. C, for instance, is emerging into the 2 word level. If I asked him about a picture, he would probably give me one noun (dog), so I would add a verb to that (dog eats). If your child told you two words (dog eats), you would add a third (dog eats kibble) and so on. Even if you aren’t reading the words, talking about the pictures can build your child’s language skills.

2. Ask Questions

Asking simple questions helps to ensure that your child comprehends what you’re reading. Concrete questions typically develop first (who, what, where), because you can use the pictures as clues. If you ask a question (What did the girl eat?) and your child doesn’t answer, you can give your child a hint by pointing in the picture and then waiting for them to verbalize. More advanced questions (when, why, how) are more appropriate for older children. The child has to use clues from the text/pictures as well as other knowledge in order to answer the question correctly. For older children, I think it’s always helpful to have them answer in complete sentences. You can use a sentence stem (starting off the sentence) to help with this. For example, if you asked Why did the dog go to sleep? You could model the answer by starting The dog went to sleep because… and let your child finish.

3. Make Predictions

Making predictions is a great skill for your older preschool-elementary school student. You can introduce the skill by talking through your reasoning for guessing what happens next (I know that the dragons don’t like things that are spicy, and I see that there are jalapenos in the salsa. I predict that they are going to breathe fire because that salsa is so hot!). You can also use the pictures, particularly the cover of a new book, to predict what the book is going to be able. Encourage your child to use the pictures, the words and prior knowledge/what they may know about the topic to predict. Encourage them to keep going, even if their prediction is not correct. For some of my middle-older elementary students at school, I love to have them come up with an alternate ending to books or make a prediction if we changed something in the book.

4. Make Connections

Making connections refers to reading books and thinking about times in your life when you’ve had similar experiences. The students at my school are encouraged to make text to self, text to world and text to text connections. By encouraging connections, reading is made more meaningful to children. For children with language delays, this helps for them to generalize vocabulary, receptive and expressive skills into other settings. I particularly like to do this with holidays. For instance, near Valentine’s day we read a story about children making Valentines. We make connections to having done that before, then we make our own valentines and practice giving them to friends, saying “Happy Valentine’s Day” and opening them. It’s a great connection and allows them to communicate more appropriately during Valentine’s activities in their classrooms.

5. Describe Nouns

Describing nouns is a great semantic, or vocabulary, skill. It helps kids to be able to talk meaningfully about their world and it helps them to talk around a word if they cannot think of it. In my speech therapy sessions, we talk about describing things by class (what type of thing is it), function (what does it do) and attributes (what does it look like). You can introduce this skill by describing items in the pictures. Make it a guessing game (I see something that is an animal, lives in the jungle, has black and orange stripes and says ROAR. What do you think it is?). You can then turn the game around and have your child describe to you.

Making reading an enjoyable experience is the most important part of book activities! I hope that these skills give you some ideas on how to target some communication skills while doing an activity your child already enjoys! Follow me on Twitter for articles and other ideas for using reading to work on speech and language skills!

Drop a comment if you try any of these ideas and let me know how they worked!