I love shared read-alouds, because it’s such a perfect thing for children and parents and such a special time and a great time to, you know, kind of take it all down just a little bit before they go to bed, and I think that’s a wonderful sharing time. Teaching them how to support making predictions to teaching them how to support really listening to the words and looking at the pictures and making sense of a story by asking good questions.
A lot of times, we parent how we were parented. Some help with what kinds of questions make your child think, or not too many questions — if you ask a question every single minute or five or six questions a page, that child’s going to forget what the story is about, right? So those kinds of things make that time so much richer for the parent and for the child and really helps them.
In fact they even did a study that combines attention with the shared storybook reading with their parents aloud. And because children don’t always pick out what’s the most important — children with autism don’t — they looked at whether if they read the story that was going to be read the next day, whether there was more attention than if they read a different story than was going to be read the next day.
And they found if they read the story that was going to be read the next day it primed that children’s mind to know what to pay attention to, and they focused on it and they were able to answer questions and really be part of the classroom discussion. So I think that’s wonderful and a way that parents can really help.
