As summer rapidly approaches and the school year winds down, it’s a great time to think about easy ways we can keep speech and language moving forward. One of the easiest and effective ways is Shared Book Reading. If you have a young child with Down Syndrome, you’re probably doing it already to a certain extent. After all, reading a book out loud to a child is one of the most natural ways parents cozy and connect with their young ones. But today I’m sharing with you some ways to make that magical story time more purposeful and productive for a variety of goals.
There is so much to be gained from shared reading. For children with Down Syndrome, Shared Book Reading (SBR) can improve language and communication:
Interventions which incorporate SBR are associated with improved language and communication outcomes for young children with DS …
Expressive language is typically an area of relative weakness in children with DS, compared with receptive language (Seager et al., 2022). This mini-review identifies increases in children’s expressive language following SBR (Na and Wilkinson, 2019; Timpe et al., 2021; Naess et al., 2022) which is also supported by existing reviews (Dowdall et al., 2020; Towson et al., 2021). This could be because SBR strategies aim to encourage children to take an active communicative role, and provide opportunities for parents to model and scaffold language in a naturally occurring context (Mol et al., 2008; Towson et al., 2021; Burgoyne and Cain, 2022)
Perhaps even more important than the pragmatic advantages of shared reading are the loftier benefits: High quality picture books with beautiful illustrations bring beauty and goodness into the lives of our children. Many picture books, if chosen carefully, inspire compassion, generosity, or wonder. And reading picture books together sometimes means laughing, crying, or marveling together, creating strong emotional bonds.
To attain those loftier benefits, I highly recommend using curated booklists. The public libraries are treasure troves of wonderful picture books, but they are also rife with inane, insipid, shallow books with scribbly illustrations. To get the real gems, you need to plan ahead and put books on hold.
Some of my favorite booklists for picture books can be found at The Read Aloud Revival and Five in a Row. You can find more recommended books here on this blog:
- Books for Little Ones
- Read Aloud Books for Grades 1-2
- A Year of Picture Books with Repetitive Text
- A Year of Picture Books with Sequencing
Shared Book Reading is so much more than just reading a book out loud to your child or taking turns reading. SBR is, essentially, a shared experience during which parent and child converse about the characters, plot, and illustrations, and how these bridge into our own lives.
Keep in mind, when having these conversations with your child with Down Syndrome, open-ended questions can be challenging. Many children with Down Syndrome have difficulty recalling words or remembering how to say them even if they do recall the words. To prevent frustration, it may be helpful to give your child options to help come up with an answer. For example, instead of asking “Who is your favorite character?” you might ask, “Who do you like better: Peter Rabbit or Mr. McGregor?” Inviting your child to point to their choices using pictures in the book is a great way to visually support their speech. After your child points to someone/something in a picture, verbalize it for your child and encourage him/her to repeat. If your child answers a question or makes a comment with a one or two word phrase, repeat it and then expand it by one word. For example, if you child points to a picture of a dog and says “dog”, you could say, “Yes! Big dog!”
Open-ended questions are challenging, however current research suggests that there are more consistent associations with open-ended questions and vocabulary development than any other type of question. So we need to do a bit of a balancing act: sometimes we challenge our children to answer open-ended questions, perhaps supporting their answer with visuals; other times we give them choice-based questions.
The most important point about Shared Book Reading is that it should be a very enjoyable and pressure free. At first, the conversations may seem more of a monologue as you do all the commenting and answering of your own questions. That’s ok! With time, and little by little, you can gently encourage your child to respond by pointing to pictures in the book and then by using sign language or visually supported speech. Reading the same picture book repeatedly will help build your child’s confidence with regards to talking about the book.
Finally, wordless books are a great way to elicit speech from your kids, as you invite them to describe what is happening on each page.
Here is a cheat sheet with ideas and tips to help you with Shared Book Reading:
Happy reading!
