How Children Become the Storyteller

Most of us know that reading to children is important. But how we read to children is also important. When most adults share a book with a preschooler, they read and the child listens. However, with dialogic reading, the adult helps the child become the teller of the story. The adult becomes the listener, the questioner, the audience for the child.

An article by Reading Rockets notes “children who have been read to dialogically are substantially ahead of children who have been read to traditionally on tests of language development. Children can jump ahead by several months in just a few weeks of dialogic reading.”

Here are some words from an Early Learning Public Library Partnership member, Carol Schuyler, as she talks about how her library encourages dialogic reading:

Kitsap Regional Library, as part of a Culture of Literacy Grant, has been doing dialogic reading training for parents during some of our story times. The titles that we chose this spring were David Wiesner’s Tuesday and Rosie’s Walk by Pat Hutchins. Our youth services librarians explained the techniques of dialogic reading to the parents, read the stories and then had the parents and children move into their own spaces to practice. Those who wanted to share their “new” stories could then do that. One parent, three weeks later, said that she never would have chosen Rosie’s Walk for her son, but that it was now his favorite book! We have continued grant funding for the fall and will be expanding the program.

In addition, with the same grant, we are working with an artist who specializes in early learning. We shared You Look Ridiculous Said the Rhinoceros to the Hippopotamus by Bernard Waber. It is now out-of-print. However, the concept is what two animals can be combined to make another animal even more “ridiculous.” After listening to the story, the children drew their new animals as an extension of the book. Their art work is at the ferry terminals, the hospital and the branch libraries. I have never been in the Bainbridge Island terminal without young children talking about the animals, either between themselves or with their parents. Imaginations fly.