Stop and ask

With a young child, reading becomes a conversation. Researchers who developed "dialogic reading" (Whitehurst and colleagues, 1988) used a simple pattern called PEER: Prompt the child to say something about the page, Evaluate their answer, Expand it, then Repeat the prompt.

A prompt can be a question with a gap ("The bear went into the…?"), a "what happened before?", or an open "what do you see?" Keep it gentle, a few times a book, not every page.