Reading With Your Child

It’s time to take a book off of the shelf and enjoy a new story (or an old favorite) with your child. While reading can be a fun way to engage with your little one, it’s also a great tool for supporting their speech and language development! Taking time to read together supports vocabulary development, early literacy skills, comprehension of language concepts, story-telling, and conversational skills. All of these are important skills for school-readiness and emergent literacy. Not to mention, it requires little preparation and uses something that we already have in our homes. With a little extra intention, we can use this beloved bed-time routine to help our children grow and learn. 

The CROWD Strategy: 

We can use the CROWD strategy to make reading together into a beneficial opportunity for promoting speech and language skills. CROWD stands for:

Completion: 

• Start a sentence and pause to let your child finish the sentence with a word.

Recall: 

• Ask your child to share with you what has already happened in the story

Open Ended Question: 

• Ask your child a question that has many possible answers such as “What’s happening on this page?”, “How do you think they feel?”, or “What would you do?”. 

WH question: 

• Ask your child a WH question such as “Who is this?” or “Where is the ___?”. 

Distancing Question: 

• Help your child make a connection with the story. 

Let’s Practice with The Little Blue Truck  by Alice Schertle:

Completion: “Wow! I see a blue ____”

Recall: “What animals did the truck already see?”

Open Ended Question/Statement: Tell me about this picture. 

WH Question: “What is the weather?” or “Where is the pig?”

Distance Question: “Do you remember what car Mom/Dad drives?” or “Can you think of someone that drives a truck?”

Practical Tips

Supporting your child’s speech and language skills, and vocabulary development can be easy to integrate into your day by actively taking time for shared reading.  Below are a few practical tips.

• Reading together supports receptive language skills (helping my child understand what words and phrases mean) and expressive language skills (helping my child use words to communicate).
• Shared reading also builds your child’s mean length of utterance (how long their phrases and sentences are when speaking). 
• If your child tends to get wiggly during stories, try to follow their lead. Feel free to talk about the pictures and let them choose the page, and the story they want to read. It’s ok to only read some of the words on the page, or even to skip the words altogether as long as your child is engaged with you. 

If you have concerns for your child’s speech and language development, or want to learn more about strategies to use at home to help your child with their communication skills, please consult with a licensed Speech-Language Pathologist for further guidance and support. Thank you to Ms. Erin Cook, speech language pathologist and member of PMC's pediatric speech therapy team, for sharing her knowledge of reading with your children! Your tips are also so helpful! 

Research was taken from:

Noble, C., Cameron-Faulkner, T., Jessop, A., Coates, A., Sawyer, H., Taylor-Ims, R., & Rowland, C. F. (2020). The impact of interactive shared book reading on children's language skills: A randomized controlled trial. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 63(6), 1878–1897. https://doi.org/10.1044/2020_jslhr-19-00288