Getting More Out of Story Time

 

Books are such amazing teaching tools

Books are such amazing teaching tools! Really, a book can do it all.

 

When teaching English, a book’s wonderful images are perfect for helping communicate stories that give students a greater understanding of the language as well as teaching them important lessons about themselves and the world. With books, for example, we can also teach students how to interpret images, how to use critical thinking to make predictions and how to retell a sequence.

 

And, of course, when a student is ready, they can read the words themselves! In this article, though, I’d like to highlight how we can move beyond a book’s narrative and images to interest pre- and early readers in the text on the page.

 
 

 

 

If you read picture books often, you know the importance of images in engaging children. Especially when reading in a second language, a good story alone won’t suffice unless it’s got pictures to back it up.

So, naturally these pictures are highly attractive. And because of how interesting these images are, it can be difficult to notice anything else on the page (notably, the boring old text).

We can also use regular old picture books to review various reading-related content, but we need to make it fun!

 

 

Let’s say your child is just learning the alphabet and you’re trying to focus on a certain letter (S). You can make it a game as you read – a kind of treasure hunt – to find S’s on the page. For higher levels, students also love to play this game with punctuation (hunting for periods, question marks and exclamations) or sight words (the, and, is, he, she, etc.)!

Importantly, with this kind of activity alone, you’re already beginning to get your child interested in the text on the page. They are beginning to process it, look for things they recognize and attempt to make meaning from them. This is a huge first step towards reading!

 


If you’re child a little more advanced and is learning to sound out simple words, you can try this: as you read a sentence (“Freddy is not a cat.”) stop before reading the word you think they can read themselves as ask them for the word.

If needed, help to blend the sounds (c a t ) and see if they can guess the word. Have them watch out for words they know. For added fun, have a piece of paper and pencil and let them write down each word they identify.

 

 

If we can bring the text into story time, in any way, we help children develop important habits that will lead to a love of reading.

Even just gliding your finger beneath the text as you read introduces your child to important aspects of reading like directionality (reading from left to right, up to down) and that words contain meaning.

While pictures are amazing, see if you can interest your child in the often-neglected text on the page of your favorite storybook!