Dialogic Reading

Mamon's school initiated a short course on Dialogic Reading before the end of the school year last year and made us practice it over the holidays.  [ Okay, those who are rolling their eyes thinking "The teacher actually gave you assignment for the holidays?!"... Hold your horses. It's not really an assignment because we have been really reading books... trying. ]

The fundamental reading technique is the PEER method, where:

Prompts the child to say something about the book, 
Evaluates the child's response, 
Expands the child's response by rephrasing and adding information to it, and 
Repeats the prompt to make sure the child has learned from the expansion.

In order to achieve this, there are 5 prompts to guide you:

Completion prompts

Recall prompts

Open-ended prompts

Wh- prompts

Distancing prompts

Of course, the results were more evident when done with Paopao. The task was to read 4 books over the holidays. 1 book each week.

It was very fast for Paopao. In fact, he can remember the book easily and relate it to our holiday experiences.

For Mamon, it was really a challenge. It required more work. The first week either:

• Eating the book
• Ripping the book in pieces
• Crying

By the end of the 4th week, he was able to listen to me finish the entire book. Offering me smiles in betweens. We still have a lot of work to do as he is non verbal and also could not follow simple prompts.

Here's an example of Dialogic Reading :

Magic happens when you don't give up even though you want to. The universe always falls in love with a stubborn heart.