Do you find it difficult to get your child excited about reading? You are not alone! In this post, we will explore an approach called ‘shared book reading’ that can help foster your child’s interest in reading.

Shared book reading is a well-established approach for supporting children’s early language development (Salley et al., 2022). This approach involves adults (e.g., parents) reading a book with the child while engaging them in discussion about the story. A structured method known as PEER (Zevenbergen & Whitehurst, 2003) is used to guide these discussions:

Now that you are familiar with the PEER method, let’s look at different ways you can prompt your child to encourage their engagement with the story:

Next time you read with your child, consider using the shared book reading PEER method along with the different types of prompts to make your reading session more interactive and engaging!

References

Salley, B., Daniels, D., Walker, C., & Fleming, K. (2022). Shared book reading intervention for parents of infants and toddlers. Journal of Early Childhood Research, 20(3), 322-340.

Zevenbergen, A. A., & Whitehurst, G. J. (2003). Dialogic reading: A shared picture book reading intervention for preschoolers. On reading books to children: Parents and teachers, 177, 200.