I love working with parents but usually it is Mom who participates in our therapy sessions or moms who attend talks that I give on talking, reading and playing with your baby to encourage language development. When the dads show up, I always get some fresh, fun take on the subject.
Today, as I was reading a book to a little boy, I was explaining to his dad that you can read the text of the picture book or simply talk about what is on the page illustrated by the pictures. Dialogic reading, I told him, is when you talk about all that the pictures are explaining, so you might spend extra time on each page using more descriptive language and vocabulary than is actually in the text. Research has shown that when parents “read” this way to young children, the kids make greater gains in language development.
Dad looked at me and said, “I get it. It’s like in college when I would read the text before going to class, but when the professor gave his lecture and talked about the information in the text book, it made sense.” What a wonderful analogy.
Thanks, Dad, for your amazing insight!
