By: Charlotte Murell

Why Is Reading An Important Language Tool?
When developing language skills, it is important to consider adding reading with your child to your list of tactics. Books are great to utilize as tools to improve receptive and expressive language skills in a huge variety of ways. Not only is reading with your child a great bonding experience but it allows your child to learn new concepts and vocabulary in a novel and exciting way. Learning language should be fun as well as engaging, and there are wonderful books with brilliant pictures and easy to understand plots to help your child learn many concepts. There have even been books written that can help with teaching social skills to children who need more complex concepts broken down into more manageable chunks. 

What To Look For In A Book
So now what? How can you go about finding some amazing books to help your child improve language skills? When I am in the process of finding books to utilize in therapy as an SLP there are a few things to look for.

• First, I want to think about the length of the book. I want to find something that is not too short or too long. Just as Goldilocks was looking for the best fit, I want to find a book that will be easily understood by the child as well as one that will hold the child’s attention for a few minutes. If it is taking you more than 5 minutes to read a book with children 4 and under, the book might be too long to hold their attention or they might get tired of waiting for something fun to happen to the characters. For children who are within school age from 5 years old to 10, I would consider a book that takes me about 10 minutes to read. For children in upper elementary, middle, and high school you want to look for books that have more complex concepts with longer paragraphs.

• Secondly, any book you want to pick out to read to your child should be engaging. If the topic of the book does not get your child’s attention and sustain that attention, you will easily lose their interest and it will be hard to recapture that focus. You can always let your child pick out a book to read from a selection of 2 or 3, so that you are providing them with some structure with the book's content and allowing them to be independent with the selection process. If your child has any special interests, use them!

• Third, when looking for an appropriate book selection, I like to look for age appropriate vocabulary. For children ages 2-5, I want to find books that have early vocabulary words to learn including animals, clothing, food, feelings, and basic concepts like prepositions, big vs small, and colors. For children ages 6-10, I tend to look for stories that have more complex plots to work on answering what/where/who/when/why/how questions. For children ages 11-18, I want to find books that are easy to read but have vocabulary words that coincide with academic learning. 

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