April 28: Supporting communication using shared reading

Many kids love to read. And many kids love to read the same books over and over and over again! This can be one advantage to using shared reading as a strategy to work on communication skills with your child. (Shared reading is reading with a child, not simply to a child, and is an interactive reading experience that involves having a conversation around a book.) Using the same book over and over again to teach core vocabulary can be an effective way to provide repetitive modelling of language for your child!

We can use core vocabulary boards and topic boards (the ones with fringe/specific vocabulary) to facilitate communication during a shared reading experience with a child. When we model language with a core board when reading, it is important to remember that this is a conversation, not an interrogation. We are inviting a child to respond if they wish, not expecting/forcing a response! We are providing expectant pauses to allow children time to process and form a response. And we are accepting any responses and reflecting that response using the core board. What I mean by reflecting the response is that if you make a comment and your child responds by smiling, touching something, or looking at something, we can reflect their response by using the core board. We could say, "I think you like that", while pointing to "you" and "like" on our core board. We interpret their message for them, even if their response does not seem intentional and does not involve them speaking or pointing to a picture on a core board. Like I mentioned in my last blog post about core boards and communication, it may take a LONG time for children to begin using core boards to expressively communicate, so our job at first is simply to provide A LOT of modelling! 😀

Many of our students really enjoy alphabet books. After making this blog post I'm going to email you an animal specific topic board as well as an alphabet board that you could use while reading an alphabet book in conjunction with the traditional core board. This way, you could use the core board to make comments, like "I see", and the topic boards to say "e" and "elephant".

Another type of book that is nice to use in a shared reading experience is any type of book that has repetition. For example, "Brown Bear, Brown Bear" might be a good book to read with your child as it is highly predictable, uses powerful rhythm, a little bit of rhyming, and includes repetitive use of core words (look/see, me, what, you).

Here's an example of a teacher using the "CAR" reading strategy with her student while doing some shared reading with a core board. CAR stands for comment, ask a question, and respond by adding a little more.

When the teacher responds, "ya, you're right, they're going to help", she may simply be interpreting the student's message for them. The student may have given no response, but the teacher created a response to model for the student how they could make their own response one day.

Finally, here's an example of the types of conversations that could be started while reading books with your child, as well as the types of core words you could target.

And remember, you don't have to sit and read an entire book from start to finish with your child! I know many children are not ready to sit and read a whole book yet. So choosing just 2 pages to look at together and talk about is a great start! Happy reading! 😊