Engaging children in reading

Reading with children from a young age will help foster a love of literature and storytelling that will last a lifetime.

Dialogic reading is a reading technique which encourages the child to develop a love of reading and books by becoming the storyteller using a series of prompts.

You will need:

• children’s books

What to do

To encourage your child to become the storyteller, you use something called the PEER sequence:

• P – Prompts the child to say something about the book
• E – Evaluates the child’s response
• E – Expands the child’s response by rephrasing and adding information to it
• R – Repeats the prompt to make sure the child has learned from the expansion

There are five types of prompts used to begin the PEER sequence, which can be remembered by the acronym CROWD:

• C – Completion prompts (child finishes the sentence)
• R – Recall prompts (ask the child if they can recall what has happened so far)
• O – Open-ended prompts (give the child an opportunity to discuss what is happening in the story or picture. You can prompt them with open-ended questions)
• W – ‘Wh’- prompts (ask ‘what,’ ‘where,’ ‘who,’ ‘why’ e.g. “Where is the Gruffalo?” or “Why did the owl fly away?”)
• Distancing prompts (give your child the opportunity to relate the story to something in their own life, e.g. “Have you been to the woods?”)

Learning and development

Dialogic reading helps to develop the children’s vocabulary, communication skills and understanding of how stories are structured. It also helps them to recall their own experiences and make links with the story.