Last week we explored ways in which parents can help enhance their child’s IQ through simple activities at home. One of the techniques is “dialogic reading.” We wanted to give our blog readers even more information so they could use this important technique at home! Children’s experience with books plays an important role in their readiness to learn, vocabulary acquisition, sentence structures, and even long-term success rates of staying in school! Studies have shown that children who are read to three times per week or more do much better in later development than children who are read to less than three times per week. And on top of that, it’s not just how much we read to them, but how we read to them!
Enter dialogic reading! In dialogic reading, the adult helps the child become the teller of the story and the adult becomes the listener, the questioner, and the audience for the child. The active involvement in the story helps the child to learn more, faster. The technique can be broken into four steps known as “PEER” sequence, allowing for short interactions between the adult and child during the reading. The adult:
- Prompts the child to say something about the book,
- Evaluates the child’s response,
- Expands the child’s response by rephrasing and adding information to it, and
- Repeats the prompt to make sure the child has learned from the expansion.
For example, imagine that the parent and the child are looking at a page of a book that has a picture of a dinosaur on it. The parent says, “What is this?” (the prompt) while pointing to the dinosaur. The child says, dinosaur, and the parent follows with “That’s right (the evaluation); it’s a green dinosaur (the expansion); can you say dinosaur?” (the repetition).
This technique should be used every time the book is read (except the first reading, to allow tehc child to learn the book). Books are much more than reading, they are learning! If you have any questions on how to do dialogic reading, feel free to contact us, we’re more than happy to help further explain!