At last! A bookmark that won’t slide out of place and get lost in the depths of kids’ backpacks (or yours). Bookmarks are key tools in raising readers, and we’ve got you covered with this super-simple, two-step bookmark craft that makes adorable, functional page markers in minutes flat. All you need are some simple materials and a bit of creativity—or just start with our examples.
You can easily turn these elastic bookmarks into an awesome holiday craft, gift, or party favor by decorating them with holiday colors or shapes cut to fit your theme. There are endless possibilities when it comes to embellishments: We picked a few of our favorites from craft-drawer staples, but they’ll be cute with just about anything you have on hand! This kid-friendly DIY book craft is perfect for all ages. You’ll just want to supervise kids using the hot glue gun.
Materials:
- Elastic headbands (make sure they’re the flat elastic variety)
- Hot glue gun
- Embellishments of your choice!
Embellishment Ideas: There are so many options out there, but here are three recommendations to get you started!
- Buttons: Maybe you have some mismatched buttons around the house … send your kids on a scavenger hunt through the junk drawers!
- Craft-foam letters/shapes: Cut out letters or shapes from craft foam.
- Paper flowers: Make one of our paper flowers out of old book pages. After all, what better way to decorate a bookmark than with upcycled book pages?
Have other ideas in mind? Please share in the comments below—we would love to hear what you come up with!
Cost: Parents of kids who like to pull their hair back often have one (or a few!) too many elastic hairbands around, in which case this is the perfect way to clean out that bathroom cabinet. Otherwise, you can purchase a pack of headbands online or at a local drugstore for about $5. Glue guns are high on our list of must-have craft tools and average around $10. Get creative with your embellishments, and that part should cost you nothing!
Step 1: The first step is just to plug in your glue gun and let it heat up while you gather or make your embellishments. Remember: Kids will need your supervision for the glue gun. If you are making your own embellishments, go ahead and do that now.
Step 2: Next, simply use the hot glue gun to attach your embellishments along one half of the headband. Make sure you don’t use more than half, so there’s a flat side to go inside your book—in fact, I recommend covering a little less than half. You can choose to add a lot of embellishments lined up close together, or you can space out just a few cute touches. Tip: If you’re spacing them out, you may want to mark where you want them to go, so as to get an even result. Let the glue dry fully, and then your new bookmark will be ready to use.
While this DIY book craft is joyously simple, you can get as creative as you want in making beautiful embellishments. But we love that even with just a few buttons, you can turn out a super-cute bookmark to save a page in your next book. With all our bookmark crafts, there is no excuse to fold down a corner!
Check out our other bookmarks and let us know which is your favorite: Bookmarks for Kids, Chucky Tassel Bookmark, Fruit Slice Corner Bookmarks, Cute Cat Bookmarks.
By Chrysta Naron
If you’ve ever sat with a beginning reader, you’ll notice that knowing letter sounds doesn’t magically jump straight to reading words fluently. Learning how to blend those sounds into a word is your child’s next step to literacy. However, it can be tricky to demonstrate without just doing it for them. With this word slide, your child will learn this key reading skill and be able to control the speed at which they read.
This simple activity is a great tool to teach reading. It’s something that you can make relatively quickly and with items you probably already have around the house. It has the added eco-friendly benefit that you can use it over and over again. (Always a plus in my book.) As a teacher, using these as a small-group activity gives children agency and the added skill of learning to help each other, a great chance for some social-emotional learning. This can be an awesome sibling bonding opportunity!
Materials Needed:
- 3 paper towel tubes
- Paper
- Marker
- Glue
- Scissors
- Buttons
- Paper clips
Cost: Free if you already own the materials!
Step 1: Cut the paper towel tubes in half lengthwise, so each tube creates two arches. These are now your “slides.” Keep five for use today and save the sixth for another day.
Step 2: On the paper, write a variety of letters, making sure to include all five vowels. You might want to write some letters twice, so you can make words like dad, mom, or pop. Cut out the letters onto little squares.
Step 3: Glue a vowel into the middle of each slide. Make sure to do it on the inside of the tube. Otherwise there will be a lot of falling and no sliding!
Step 4: Choose a letter to put on either side of the vowel, to make a word. For example, on your slide with the letter O, you might add the letters P and T to make the word pot. For the letter A, you might choose S and T to make sat.
Step 5: Next, attach the outer letters with paper clips on each end of the slide.
Step 6: Sit with your child and help them say each sound on the slide individually.
Step 7: Hold the slide flat and put the counter next to the first letter. Slightly tilt the tube so the counter slides down. Say the letter sounds as the counter slides along each letter. Now, let your child take over and slide again, then again a little faster—sliding the sounds faster and faster until they form a complete word!
Tip: If you don’t have buttons, you can use other small, smooth items like pennies, counters, or checkers. I would avoid round beads, as it is difficult to control the speed at which they slide.
Now that you and your child have mastered using the slide, you can help them reproduce the skill when reading together. Ask questions like, “How would we say this on the slide?” or “Can we say and slide the sounds?” You could even keep the slides near your bookshelf as a tool for when your child needs more help.
Have fun sliding into reading!
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By Maya Payne Smart
Austin may be known for live music and technology show stoppers ACL and SXSW, but the quieter, gentler TBF stole my heart when I landed in Texas. Within weeks of moving to town, I signed up to volunteer with the Texas Book Festival’s Reading Rock Stars program, which brings authors to Title I schools and gives each child a book, sometimes the very first they’ve ever owned. And within a few months I joined the festival’s board and served for four years.
This year the Texas Book Festival celebrated its 25th anniversary in grand fashion, with two weeks of stellar virtual programming amid a pandemic. And while the warmth and energy of in-person book events doesn’t translate via Zoom, I can attest—based on my experience hosting conversations with Pulitzer Prize-winner Natasha Tretheway and PEN/Hemingway award-winner Yaa Gyasi—that virtual conversations bring an intimacy and power all their own.
Here are four festival author reflections from 2020 that I won’t soon forget:
Natasha Tretheway, author of Memorial Drive, on Revisiting Subjects
“A lot of great writers have told us, like Faulkner, the past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past. Or, Baldwin, people are trapped in history and history is trapped in them. I think that that’s absolutely true. In many ways we are in our traces, in the loop of this history . . . at the same time that we’re trying to advance forward, we keep circling back to some difficult moments. I think we’ve seen that in recent years, with the rise of vocal, visible, and more virulent forms of white supremacy that have been given a platform. If people thought that that was behind us, I think that what we are seeing is how much we’ve circled back to it and that the reckoning with it is still yet to be done . . .
“There are innumerable ways to approach these subjects. That’s why we continue to have books about the Civil War. It’s seemingly inexhaustible in terms of what it can tell us, not only about the past, but where we’re headed. Each new lens gives us a new way of understanding ourselves as Americans.
“As I was sitting down to work on this book, Memorial Drive, there would be moments that I would have to stop writing prose and turn the page over, because something was coming out as a poem instead. . . . The newer poems in my last book, Monument, which was my first retrospective, grew out of writing about my mother and our history in prose, but needing to stop because some of it came out as poems. And the things that come out as poems approach the subject from various and different angles.
“And to go the other way, from my very first book of poetry, Domestic Work, I was writing about this place, my mother’s extended family, things that happened to me as a child in Mississippi that come back as scenes in this book, but I have the opportunity to delve deeper into them in the prose and to look at the same situation in a very different way . . .
“It feels like palliative care, because the wounds can’t be reopened because they’ve not closed, they’ve not healed. The metaphor of palliative care works because that is what you do to a wound that can’t heal. You can keep it clean, you can do things to mitigate the pain, and you can keep it exposed to light. That’s what I do. And I think that returning to investigate, to write out of those particular wounds, is a form of palliative care. And I go back to the words of the poet Rumi, the wound is the place where the light enters you. And so it is a place that is, though painful, both defining and necessary. I think it gives me a particular kind of vision.”
Brit Bennett, Author of The Vanishing Half, on Empathy in Characterization
“I’m interested in representing a fictional world that’s as diverse as our actual world. And also, I’m interested in representing it in a way in which that diversity is not a conflict. That’s not to say that characters are not facing conflicts based on who they are. Obviously, that’s a big part of the book.
“But one of the things I wrote down going into this was that I didn’t want these characters’ identities to be problems that the story has to solve. To me that’s a different thing than characters facing the problem, for example, of racism or misogyny or transphobia. That is a problem, but being transgender is not a problem, being a black person or being a woman is not a problem. So to me, that was the distinction that I wanted to write toward.
“I think that’s more interesting. I think that there can be these really easy and simplistic ways that we have of thinking about identity, where if you’ve introduced a character who’s like this, then this conflict needs to arise from that. To me, it’s just boring. That was less interesting to me than, okay, now you have these two people, how are they going to work out their issues that are not about ‘this person has this type of body or this person has that type of body,’ but their issues about other things that you just struggle with as a person. So to me, those were some of the things that I’ve thought about . . .
“I think empathy also is just more interesting than bigotry. I think empathy is always more interesting than bigotry. Part of it was again of how I want to see the world and how I want to create a fictional world, but the other part of it is, yeah, it’s more interesting to write a character who has empathy than a character who is a bigot. I just think bigotry is very boring. So those were some of the things that I was thinking about in crafting the world, but I just wanted the world to look, to feel as diverse as our world is.”
Mychal Denzel Smith, author of Stakes is High, on Finding and Sustaining Hope
“The abolitionist organizer Mariame Kaba would say, hope is a discipline. It’s something that you cultivate every single day and it’s done by engaging in the work. Because it’s easy to look out and to be cast into despair because it’s like, What? We’re not winning.
“But when you are looking and you are in community with people who are committed to the work at the same level you’re committed to the work, and you’re getting little victories here and there, the hope is ingrained in you, because you understand that maybe you’re not winning the whole thing today. Maybe you’re not even winning the whole thing in your lifetime, but you’re doing something that’s setting the groundwork. You are becoming a good ancestor. You are giving future generations this ability to, when they look back at the history, to say, no, it’s not that—as we do now with every racist, every rapist—they were a person of their times.
“We don’t have to look back and say, Donald Trump was just a person of his times. We get to say there were other people who lived through that moment, and they fought and they fought back, and they were tenacious, and they did everything that they could in their power to ensure that the world that the Donald Trumps and everyone who follows him wants to come to pass, it doesn’t have to be. You do that and you engage in that and you find your people. You find the people that you are aligned with and grow that coalition and keep finding more people, and you build community, and you find these love connections with people to be able to sustain you.”
Yaa Gyasi, author of Transcendent Kingdom, on Writing about Addiction and Depression
“I think starting with the science really helped. Gifty [the protagonist] . . . the research that she does is modeled on the research that my friend does, and reward-seeking. Before I started researching this novel, I hadn’t really ever thought about things like addiction and depression as existing on this one spectrum. But through this work, one thing that came up for me was this idea that they both involve reward-seeking circuits of the brain. So with addiction, the animal continues to seek reward even when there’s great risk involved. And with depression, the animal cannot seek reward, even though there’s pleasure despite any risk. Once I kind of thought about these two things as existing on this spectrum, it helped me to enter into it.
“But the other piece of the research, beyond the science, was just talking to people, reading as much as I could from firsthand accounts of people who had struggled with this kind of major depressive episode. I think that was really moving and also really helpful. But it is something that’s difficult to write about.
“The other thing that helped is that I wasn’t writing it from the perspective of Gifty’s mother. That would have been another layer of difficulty to try to get into what she was feeling from that kind of lived experience. This way I’m seeing around it. I’m seeing it through the eyes of Gifty, who’s experiencing it as a caretaker, which I think is obviously a very different experience than experiencing it for oneself . . .
“I was thinking a lot about how culture and mental health are so intertwined. And how we witness or experience these illnesses has so much to do with the communities that we grew up in. Even that opening . . ., what you’re witnessing is Gifty’s shame and fear around seeing this man. But she describes the fact that nobody in the market seems afraid. Nobody in the market seems disgusted. Nobody’s parting the waters for this man to walk through. At some point, she says something like, his presence was weather, it wasn’t a thunderstorm, it was like a cloud on an otherwise sunny day.
“For me, that way of bringing in the way that other people experience or think about these different issues, the language and vocabulary of these communities for talking about things like depression and addiction, was just one way to see how culture and, specifically, mental health are deeply, deeply intertwined.”
By Chrysta Naron
Letters are keys for children to unlock the written world, and their futures. They’re also shapes—complicated ones. Teaching your child to see and form these important lines and curves will set them on the path to reading. Yet all those letters can look a whole lot alike to young kids. This crafty early literacy activity helps even the youngest kids, who can’t yet write with a pencil, distinguish and remember letters.
This easy project leverages the power of talking about letters and breaking them down to their parts. Discussing, describing, and dissecting each letter’s unique shape helps kids identify (and recreate) these all-important symbols. Pointing out how straight or curved lines come together in a particular letter draws kids’ attention to the details necessary to tell them apart. This easy at-home letter-learning activity is great for doing that in a fun, tactile way.
This activity is a twist on classic playdough letters, but with two important changes: We’ll write each letter in front of our children, giving them the chance to observe how we hold a pen and move it across the paper to form the letter. And we’ll use craft sticks to highlight the difference between the straight and curved lines that form our alphabet.
Materials Needed:
- Craft sticks
- Playdough
- Marker
- Paper
- Gallon sandwich bags
Cost: $6 for a bag of craft sticks, sandwich bags, and a container of playdough
Step 1: Write some uppercase letters on a piece of paper. Make them quite large, one letter per page. You will be laying craft sticks over the letters, so you can use the length of a stick for a guide as to size.
Tip: Starting with the letters in your child’s name will get extra buy-in, as children are drawn to their own name. Talk to your child as you create each letter: Say the name and describe its attributes. For example, if you write the letter A, you might say “This is the letter A. It has two lines that touch like a mountain and one line that goes across the middle, like a bridge.”
Step 2: Slide each letter into its own gallon sandwich bag. This allows you to roll playdough all over the letters without destroying the paper on each use.
Step 3: Select a letter that is all straight lines, such as A, L, M, or X. Point to the lines and explain that some letters are tall and strong, so they need strong and tall lines, just like craft sticks. Demonstrate how to create the letter by laying craft sticks over the written letter. Invite your child to try.
Note: I noticed that when my students try to create letters with just dough, certain letters sag that should sit straight. Adding craft sticks allows them to create a better likeness for each letter, enhancing the learning.
Step 4: Select a letter that is completely round, such as O, C, or U. Roll out a long snake-like piece of playdough. Explain that some letters are soft and round, so we’re making them with something soft and round (dough). Show your kiddo how to create the letter by shaping the playdough onto the letter. Invite your child to try this, too.
Tip: Depending on their level, you might have to make the playdough strips for them. But this is also a great chance to develop those fine motor skills!
Step 5: Choose a letter with straight and curved elements, like D, P, or B. Explain that some letters are both tall and round, so we need craft sticks and playdough. Use both materials to create the letter, letting your child show you where they think the sticks and dough should go.
Step 6: Let your child take the lead! Get all the letters together and ask prompting questions while they create each letter. What’s the name of this letter? Do you know any words or names that start with this letter? How are you going to make it? Let them try to form the letters as independently as possible.
Our world is made up of letters, and one day your child’s letters might make up the world. So let’s get started—today!
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By Maya Payne Smart
More and more students enter school with no knowledge of classic nursery rhymes, primary school teachers report. Some traditional poems like Baa Baa Black Sheep passed from generation to generation for centuries, but they hold markedly less appeal for today’s parents. Indeed, many parents admit not recalling the nursery rhymes of their youth, let alone teaching them to their kids. And this has some educators, researchers, and early childhood experts worried.
Heightened scrutiny of the lyrics and origins of traditional songs plus competition from flashier child entertainment options contribute to the decline. Some of the classic tunes have undeniably racist roots, and conscious parents don’t want to pass their offensive themes and imagery on to a new generation. Other rhymes just feel dated and of uncertain value to younger parents. Going on about an old woman who lived in a shoe seems no more enriching than bopping along to Baby Shark.
But nursery rhyme defenders insist that the vast repertoire of traditional songs (offensive titles excluded) present unparalleled opportunities to foster sought-after early literacy skills, easily, enjoyably, and affordably. I’m inclined to agree. Here’s a rundown of the top reasons to add nursery rhymes—classic, remixed, or brand new—to your daily parenting routines.
Brain Development
Professor Usha Goswami, director of the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Neuroscience in Education, says four key caregiver behaviors help babies acquire language:
- making eye contact
- speaking in exaggerated, sing-song tones
- responsiveness to the infants’ actions, movements, and verbalizations
- taking turns in “conversation” (even before kids can truly talk).
Nursery rhymes incorporate all four behaviors and therefore play a vital role in children’s earliest development. When parents gaze at a baby, gently grasp her big toe, sing this little piggy went to market, then pause for a coo or babble in response, they are sending communicative, brain-building signals that even a newborn can recognize and learn from.
The regular cadence, plus the rhymes’ rise and fall, provide “the perfect rhythmic template for the developing brain,” Goswami says. When sung, the traditional tunes move air molecules and create waves of sound pressure at rates that align well with the way brain cells in the auditory cortex move, she told The Times Educational Supplement. The deliberate, rhythmically regular speech exaggerates the signal in ways that help the developing brain convert sound into neural signals and make sense of language.
Word Learning
Baby language proceeds from grunts to coos to babbles, often not arriving at anything resembling recognizable speech until a child is ten months or older. But evidence suggests infants understand their first word (often their own name) as young as four months old. The median vocabulary size at 16 months is 55 words and jumps to ten times that by 30 months. And the talking, singing, or reading of caregivers introduced each and every one.
Toddlers typically hear thousands of words a day, which includes any nursery rhymes their parents sing. If it weren’t for repeated recitations of Little Miss Muffett, I wouldn’t have learned the words tuffet, curds, and whey for years, if ever. But long before kindergarten, I picked up this unusual vocabulary and held a mental picture of a little girl seated on a stool eating something like cottage cheese.
Research confirms it wasn’t only the repetition that aided my word learning, but the power of the rhyme itself. Rhymes encourage kids to anticipate upcoming words and that active curiosity about what’s coming next makes new vocabulary more memorable, hypothesizes researcher Kirsten Read. The building anticipation and extra predictability of a rhyming word at the end of a stanza may heighten kids’ attention and thereby help the new words stick.
Phonological Awareness
As adults, it’s easy to look at a word like cat, see its three letters, and associate them with three distinct sounds. But that’s a learned perception. In speech, the /c/, /a/, and /t/ sounds in cat are all blurred together. Kids have to learn to discern where one sound ends and the next one begins.
Nursery rhymes support future reading by heightening kids’ sensitivity to the syllables and the separate beginning, middle and ending sounds within words. The stress patterns of classics like Jack and Jill went up the hill help children learn about rhymes, an important phonological dimension. And the alliteration in a rhyme like Peter Piper Picked a Peck of Pickled Peppers accentuates the /p/ sound and helps it stand out from surrounding sounds, a finer-grained level of sound sensitivity.
Fine Motor Skills
Kids need to develop the tiny muscles in their hands and fingers to hold a crayon, pen, or pencil and learn to write. Parents can take a cue from children’s librarians and preschool teachers and use “fingerplays”—songs and rhymes acted out with hands and fingers alone. From hand-clapping to the tune of Pat-A-Cake with a baby to the more delicate pinching movements and wrist turns of the Itsy Bitsy Spider crawling up the water spout, these classic interactive rhymes boost kids’ fine motor skills and eye-hand coordination.
See this great video demo from Ms. Melissa, a children’s librarian with the Austin Public Library.
Did you learn nursery rhymes as a kid? Will you carry on the tradition?
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Why buy a pencil case when you can make your own in a few simple steps? Duct tape comes in so many fun patterns that you can use to create a super-cute DIY pencil case. You can even punch three holes along the bottom of your case and it will fit perfectly in a binder.
Once you get the hang of cutting the duct tape, this DIY pencil case craft will not take long at all. Kids might need a little help aligning the tape, but they can easily join in and create their own special, personalized bag for their school binder or backpack. It will make it so much more exciting for them to pull out a pencil for homework or to work on literacy activities at home! This could also be a great accessory to our to-go activity kit for kids.
Materials:
- One gallon-sized ziplock plastic bag
- Duct tape in a fun print or color (or multiple styles to create your own pattern)
- Ruler
- Marker
- Scissors
Optional:
- Three-hole punch or single-hole punch
- Plastic cutting mat if you have one (this makes cutting the duct tape easier, but is definitely not necessary!)
Cost: Nothing, if you have these simple supplies on hand. Otherwise, duct tape should be available from a local craft store (or there are many options on Amazon!) for a few dollars.
Step 1: Take your ruler and draw a line across the ziplock bag three inches up from the bottom. With your scissors, cut that part off.
Step 2: Next, measure and cut five pieces of duct tape, 10 ½” each. Cut them all from one roll, or cut a variety of colors/patterns to mix and match! Tip: If you have a plastic cutting mat, you can lay the tape flat on the mat, and then peel it off once you have cut your piece. I did not have a mat, so I just attached the tape to the edge of my table, measured, and cut, and I had no problem.
Step 3: Starting at the top edge of the ziplock bag, carefully attach your first piece of duct tape over the plastic of the bag and all the way across to the other side. Try to make the piece as flat as possible! Simply repeat with three more pieces of duct tape, working your way down the bag. You will want to slightly overlap the pieces of tape where the edges meet, to ensure you fully cover the bag. The last piece should hang over the bottom of the bag just a bit, so fold that part over to the other side of the bag. One side down!
Step 4: Now it’s time to cover the other side of the bag. Cut four more pieces of duct tape, this time to 12” each. Repeat the same process as the other side, again starting at the top of the bag again, but this time leave about ½” extra tape on each side and fold that over to the other side. Continue to work your way down the bag just as you did before.
Step 5: Lastly, you will want to reinforce the sides and the bottom edge of the bag with another layer of duct tape. For this, you will need two pieces that are 7 ¾” long (for the sides) and one piece that is 10 ½” long (for the bottom edge). Press and smooth the duct tape around the side and bottom edges, so it’s secure on both sides of the bag.
Optional: Step 6: The very last step (if you want!) is to punch holes in the bag so that you can insert your new pencil pouch in a loose-leaf binder. If you don’t use a binder and love your pencil pouch as-is, you can completely skip this step. For those that would like to, though, simply use a three-hole punch along the bottom edge of the bag. (If you don’t have a three-hole punch, you can trace the holes from a piece of binder paper and then punch them with a regular hole punch.)
Enjoy! We can’t wait to see what fun duct tape patterns you find—there are so many colorful options to choose from.
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The term “read aloud” is deceptively simple—so self-evident in meaning that it seldom inspires discussion beyond admonitions to read with feeling and do it daily. But three decades of reading research reveals that there’s much more than reading aloud going on during the best story times. And, in fact, conversation that veers off the page may be as literacy-rich as the words in print.
Caregivers use more than 20 different kinds of speech during read-alouds, ranging from pointing out objects and urging kids to pay attention, all the way to explaining words’ meanings and connecting text to personal experience. It’s not literature, but dynamic parent-child conversation packs major benefits for future reading by encouraging kids to use their voices. To maximize the literacy-boosting benefits of reading aloud, parents should recognize the range of skills it can help kids develop and hone in on whichever ability their child is currently working on. (See Three Reasons to Read Aloud to Babies.)
Getting a sense of your own read-aloud style will help you consciously adapt it to best support your child’s evolving literacy needs. For example, do you tend to read straight through a text? Or do you pause frequently to reflect out loud on what you’ve read? Do you point at words or objects? Do you ask your child about what’s happening in the story or how it relates to them? Research says the more active, verbal engagement on your child’s part, the better—and asking them questions, plus responding to theirs as you go, encourages that.
A highly interactive approach didn’t come naturally to me. I knew reading to my daughter was important and did it regularly, but I thought of it more as a recitation than a dialogue, especially before she began talking. I took my cues on what a read-aloud was supposed to be from memories of Reading Rainbow, even sharing some of the exact same titles—Bringing the Rain to Kapiti Plain, Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters, and Just Us Women. I brought a selection of diverse titles and my best Levar Burton voice to every reading.
My awareness that there were other, more interactive, responsive ways to read aloud (that a television show couldn’t fully convey) came from reading research studies and seeing video footage of real parent-child story time exchanges. Those examples gave me the perspective to see my style as one of many and the insight to know which elements of other approaches might benefit my daughter as she aged. It was a gift to discover that what I’d labeled distracted and off-task talk was actually the kind of smart engagement that fuels language skills and expressive ability. That it took longer to get through a story was no longer a problem once I viewed these interruptions and digressions as encouraging my child to talk, and not merely listen.
Here I’ve defined six not-particularly-scientific (but still research-backed) parent read-aloud types and offered some tips and pointers to keep in mind. See if you can spot a bit of yourself in some of the types below. I know I’ve worn several of these hats during my tenure as a parent—sometimes all in one sitting.
The Performer
This parent brings the drama. She has a voice for every character and facial expressions, too. Her intent is to captivate and immerse her listeners in the world of story. She feels successful when her child sits rapt on the edge of the seat, waiting for the page to turn and the tale to advance. She lives for spontaneous tears and laughter, the surest signs that her little listeners were moved by the reading. Her danger zone is getting so wrapped up in the performance that she forgets to pause to ask children to verbalize their ideas and reactions, missing golden opportunities to build up their voices and expand on their responses, the stuff of early language learning.
The Therapist
This parent is deeply concerned with the social-emotional dimensions of every story. He reads characters’ facial expressions more than the text, ever alert to signs of happiness, fear, or distress. He doesn’t hesitate to relate the story to real-life experience and hunt for the moral of every illustration. He’s the parent most likely to utter the phrase, This book saved my life. His approach may be enhanced from time to time by calling kids’ attention to details regarding the print itself, book organization, and the way written and spoken language connect. (See my read-aloud tips for some examples of how to do this.)
The Drill Sergeant
This commanding parent tends toward the didactic, sees a lesson on every page, and questions her kids non-stop. Where’s the bunny? What is she doing with the ball? Where’s the word sunshine? What letter is that? No characters, words, or objects escape her notice or inquisition, which is great for directing attention and creating lots of opportunities for child response. She can soften and warm her approach by letting the story breathe and leaving space to notice (and follow) the child’s own interests.
The Griot
This parent has a book in hand but scarcely consults its pages, preferring to weave riddles, parables, and narratives all his own. He invites his children to tell their tales, too, giving full attention to their creations and responding with lavish encouragement and praise. The tellings and retellings are acts of creation and of culture, if unlikely teachers of print concepts. But there’s undoubted power in capturing kids’ attention, holding space for their imaginings, and making it all fun. This type of storyteller may love to bring wordless picture books into story time. He can draw kids’ attention to features such as the book title and illustrator’s name on the cover to teach a little print awareness before going his own way.
The Listener
This parent is the picture of responsiveness. She reads with fluency and expression, but stays attuned to her child. She pauses at even the hint of an utterance from her little one, affirms that she’s heard it, and answers by pushing the dialogue (and learning) further. Open-ended questions are her specialty, and story time delivers the richest vocabulary and language learning around. This mom loves the occasion that story time creates for closeness and the conversation it inspires. Luckily, all that talk is literacy-building too. This parent may draw largely on instinct in connecting to and nurturing her little one, but she can always benefit from some gentle focus on the details of print, too—check out my read-aloud tips for kindergarten readiness for ideas.
The Baton Passer
This parent is all about taking turns and doesn’t pass up any opportunities to get kids in on the action. Even before his little one can talk, this parent says your turn and listens attentively to whatever coo or babble comes next. As his toddler ages into a preschooler, he happily accepts the child’s narration of the pictures as “reading” and keeps on trucking. In early elementary, the parent and child alternate reading pages aloud, with the dad just jumping in to correct a misread, omitted, or mispronounced word on the child’s pages. This parent will love learning more about how literacy develops, delving into topics like reading expression. Now that’s raising a reader!
Did you see elements of your own reading style in any of the descriptions above? Do you see opportunities to try some new approaches?
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All my kiddos are top notch chefs. I have eaten some of the best imaginary banana cupcakes and sand buckets filled with stew in the world. I bet you have too. So today, let’s cook up a little “edible” literacy activity for you and your little one to enjoy!
Dramatic play (aka “playing pretend”) is a very important part of child development and one of the most enjoyable parts of any day with young kids. It can be tough to ask a child to stop being a superhero in order to sit and do a worksheet or review flashcards. Making alphabet “soup” is a terrific way to incorporate both pretend play and literacy practice into one fun game. This playful activity feels fast-paced but still requires children to reflect on letters and their sounds to find the right ingredients for their “soup.” You can scale it to play one-on-one or with a group.
Read on for step-by-step instructions, plus tips on modifying the game for early letter learners or those with limited mobility.
Materials Needed:
- Large empty container
- Mixing spoons
Cost: Nothing! Just get creative with a big “pot” for your alphabet soup.
Step 1: Find a good-sized empty container, like a laundry basket or empty box. Place it in the middle of the room and give your child (or each child) a spoon. Tell them that they’re going to make alphabet soup and this container is their “pot!” They need one ingredient for every letter of the alphabet. That’s 26 things!
Tip: For children who are just learning their letters, you can make soup with a subset of letters. Start with letters the children are familiar with, including the first initial of their names, plus common letters. You can also focus on certain skills with special versions like “vowel soup.”
Step 2: The first ingredient has to start with the letter “A.” Remind your child of the different sounds the letter can make and then send them off to explore for items! Will they find an apple? An alligator? An acorn?
Step 3: Each time your child brings back an item, have them place it in the “pot” and remind them of the next letter and its sound(s). Then send them to search for the next ingredient, which will begin with the next letter in the alphabet (or in your subset of letters).
When you have all the ingredients, stir them up and try your yummy new alphabet soup!
Adaptation: If your child has limited physical mobility, another option is to place a variety of items on a table or other surface they can reach. They can direct you about which ingredient to pick up for their very special soup.
At the end of the day, what I want my students to take away with them is not only the memory of letters of the alphabet and early literacy skills, but also the memory of the joy they had while learning. Alphabet soup is a dish that provides both.
Bon appetit!
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From the pediatrician’s office to parenting magazine columns, numerous voices tout the benefits of regularly reading aloud to young children for language development. But storytime quantity is just part of the equation. How parents read to kids (not just how often) matters too, and I don’t mean the pacing and performance qualities of reading aloud. No matter how thrilling the story or a parent’s delivery, a verbatim front-to-back reading of a book leaves out critical brain-building, literacy-boosting power.
A robust body of research dating back to the 1980s positively associates interactive parent-child reading with language-development gains. This is not the one-way speech of a parent holding forth while a child sits quietly enraptured, but rather the dynamic back-and-forth volleying of questions and comments beyond what appears on the page. These little detours and digressions are golden, research shows, because they move parent and child into a realm of greater linguistic complexity and vocabulary diversity than typical conversation does. They get the child thinking, making inferences and predictions, and formulating questions and comments of their own.
Even before kids can talk, there’s tremendous benefit to asking questions and waiting for responses. An infant’s coos and babbles in response to a caregiver’s question are signs of cognitive stimulation and crucial brain architecture formation. (See The Three Best Reasons to Read Aloud to Babies for more details.)
All of this is great news! Purposeful, knowledgeable parents can move the needle for their child’s early literacy by making only minor tweaks to their storytime routines. When mindful, we can pause, point, comment, question, and otherwise elicit responses from kids to make the most of read-alouds’ literacy-building power. Here are seven research-backed ways to capture your child’s attention during storytime and give them all the vocabulary and brain boosts you can.
Point and Trace
Look at that!
The index finger is an incredibly powerful and overlooked tool for bringing kids’ attention to print. Eye-tracking studies show that when left to their own devices, children focus almost exclusively on the pictures in a book, not the lines of type. This means that simply reading—while the child examines the pictures—misses the opportunity to raise their awareness of how letters, words, and written language work. Getting in the habit of tracing your finger under lines of text as you read is a great start for directing the child’s attention. Plus, a simple call to look at a particular object or word on the page is a great tool for engagement.
Label
There’s the teddy bear! That’s a kitten!
To take things up a notch, parents can speak the name of an object while pointing to its picture, so that children begin to associate a spoken word with the image in print. Some research suggests that imagery is enormously helpful for early word learning, as evidenced by the fact that young children tend to learn nouns, which evoke a clearer visual in the mind’s eye, more readily than verbs.
Request Labels
What’s that on his head?
Asking the child to name an object on a book page instead of supplying the label for them nudges them to search their own memory bank, conjure the right word, and speak it aloud. Both practices have their place, depending upon the book’s content and the child’s age or knowledge. But placing the onus on the child to provide the name is thought to stimulate expressive vocabulary.
Ask Five WH Questions
Who has the bedtime bonnet?
What is his grandpa doing?
When will they bake the cake?
Where’s Johnny?
Why does Tamika look so excited?
Who, what, when, where, and why—plus how—questions are always great conversation starters and tend to evoke longer, richer responses than yes/no questions. In a cool naturalistic study that compared two childcare workers’ styles of reading aloud to a toddler named Charlie, there were marked differences in his response to and initiation of speech with each caregiver. He was much more verbose with Pam, who asked lots of WH-questions. Her queries prompted him to use more words and a wider variety of words describing animals, people, and objects. This observational study offers a glimpse into the ways adults’ language choices and discussion styles affect kids’ language practice and development.
Affirm and Expand
Yes, the chocolate cake looks tasty.
Some of the richness of the language that kids experience during read-alouds comes from the sophistication of the text on the page, but a good bit comes from parents’ commentary around the books. This extra talk that veers off script offers more diverse verbs and vocabulary, and lengthier stretches of speech, than recitation of the printed text alone. Plus, it gives children greater opportunity to respond with more conversational turns of their own. Seize openings to model more elaborate responses to questions, showing little ones how it’s done. For example, if a child answers a who-question with just the name Grandpa, a parent could respond with Yes, Grandpa has the pink bonnet.
Relating the Story to the Child’s Life or Experiences
Do you remember when we jumped in puddles outside?
When encouraged by adults, children as young as preschool can relate what they hear during read-alouds to their personal experiences and other books they’ve heard. This comparing and contrasting, reminiscing and reflection all present stimulating opportunities to think abstractly and express themselves.
Respond to the Child’s Questions
Countless parents have grown weary of bedtime reading and long for a quick end to storytime. The stresses of getting a child or two to sleep spawned the profane bestseller “Go the F*ck to Sleep” and a sequel, “F*ck, There Are Two of You.” One survey of more than 1,000 parents found that one-third feel so tired at the end of the day that they skim or “rush read” books to their children. And academic research across continents overwhelmingly cites time constraints as the major barrier to consistent, enjoyable reading with kids. Yet taking the time to thoughtfully respond to kids’ inquiries in the moment is powerful. They are asking because they are interested, so don’t squander a tailor-made opportunity to affirm their engagement and expand upon it. The engagement and dialogue is more important than getting to The End.
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Big eyes in little faces as they behold a trove of gifts just for them. Delivering an enticingly wrapped bundle to a loved one. Spreading holiday cheer, and letting someone know we’re thinking about them. Nothing says holiday spirit like sharing gifts, and, as the days turn colder, thoughts naturally turn to acquiring them.
All that generosity may bring joy to young and old, but it isn’t always a gift to our planet, or our pocketbooks. Creating homemade presents can be the perfect way to indulge in the best of the season while avoiding its excesses, and ones that engage children and inspire learning will bring out their best, as well.
So why not complement a few choice store-bought items with these lovely literacy-supporting DIYs? We’ve selected six cute reading- and writing-themed projects that you can make or upcycle from a few simple materials. Then let the stocking-stuffing begin!
Need to keep kids entertained on the go? This simple DIY activity kit is perfect for road trips or plane trips, for restaurants, or for anywhere kids need some distraction while they wait. (Think instant entertainment on the sidelines of big sister’s soccer game or big brother’s guitar practice!) Keep your child’s activity book stocked with crayons or markers, stickers, and index cards (or paper cut to the book’s size), so they always have entertainment at hand. You can also create mini worksheets for some extra fun and even some early literacy and math learning. For example, draw an alpha-bingo game board on one of your index cards to include in the kit. You could also make some of our word-family flowers to keep in the kit.
Filling your home with books, whether bought or borrowed, is a great way to show kids that you value family reading. And while the stories and illustrations between the covers matter most, attractively displaying the books can build excitement. I recreated the DIY Honey Bear Bookends from Pretty Providence and think they’re the perfect eye candy to bring kids’ attention to the sweet titles on your shelves.
This accordion book craft is a great one to do with kids. Not only is it easy to make a pretty little book, it’s also a fun way to encourage children to write—they’ll be eager to fill these cute pages. Plus they can wrap the covers with an original drawing or painting, a great way to give kid creations a second life. For a sweet home-literacy activity, invite children to write their own stories inside their DIY accordion book. Older kids can create a comic strip or illustrated story. For younger kids, consider helping them make an alphabet book with a couple of letters per page, plus drawings of items whose names start with those letters. Once their masterpieces are ready, they can stand them up and put them on display!
Raising little readers and writers means providing plenty of reading and writing material, which in turn can mean a whole lot of pencils and pens trailing around your home. But never fear! With just a little glam, you can upcycle a plastic container into the perfect storage container for pencils, markers, and even crayons! There are so many different plastic containers for food that are the perfect size to repurpose into a pencil holder. This is a fun, easy, and environmentally responsible project with just a few simple steps!
These might be my new favorite DIY craft bookmarks! The chunky tassels are so fun and make it super easy to find your spot in a book, even for little hands. They’re also eye-catching and hard to misplace … hopefully encouraging young readers to use them instead of folding down the page corner! (We can always dream.)
There’s nothing quite like a new notebook for inviting possibility, its crisp pages tantalizing us with speculation about what’s to come. And personalizing a notebook is the perfect way to channel that sense of possibility and really make it our own. So why not kick off a new year, a new project, or a new diary with this DIY book-page decoupage notebook? (Hint: It also works to give old notebooks new life! Younger siblings will never know the difference, but the planet will thank you.)
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