Tuesday, October 1, 2013

Tell Me a Story, Elaine Reese

Tell Me a Story, Elaine Reese, ISBN: 9780199772650
Read Sept 23, 2013.

Nonfiction: interactive story-sharing.

Excellent parenting/professional guide discussing how reading and literacy and oral language skills improve children's mental stats, their ability to learn, and their emotional skills, metacognition, and theory of mind.

Not a bad slate of improvements for a fairly simple technique - involving the child in telling (or sharing) a recitation of story - either from actual books (from wordless picture-books on up through adult-level fiction and nonfiction) or from telling and re-telling stories of your own family (from the time you went to the zoo, to the time grandpa ended up in the hospital) or from allowing the child to create stories of their own (from fictional "and then I grew wings and flew to the moon" to chapters-long created adventures cribbed from Star Wars or Warhammer.  

Nice balance between scientific study and child-development milestones (listed at the end of each chapter with real-life implications and indications) and actual transcripts of kids and parents/researchers using the techniques with actual kids (some of whom we see over and over again between infancy and teenagerhood).  Very interesting resource, but not complicated enough or profound enough to feel like I need to own it.

If you're already devoted to literacy and language skills, it's pretty much a simplified and straightforward set of examples to make sure you're loading as much language into every encounter with your kids as is humanly possible.  Knowing my husband and me, I doubt that's going to be a problem.     

No comments:

Post a Comment