Sparling – conversational reading

Conversational reading is a form of reading to children and one, again, this is done on a very individualized basis. With children under age three it’s done one on one; the teacher sits down with one child and reads a book. She reads a book individually to every child every day. And often teachers who are doing this well will in fact read several books to each child every day and if you’re working with children that are age three and four you read books in pairs, so you read to pairs of children and you have a special technique that you use in reading called the three S strategy, and the three S’s are see, show, and say. The teacher tries to get the child to see the things on the page, the child is responding to the teacher’s request to look at a certain thing, and the teacher’s checking does the child look at that thing? And then show, you’re trying to ask the child a question and the child gives you the answer by showing something on the page, by touching, pointing, covering, tickle, sometimes we say “tickle the monkeys toes,” or “cover the tiger there on the page, and then by saying, and there we ask the child “what’s this person doing” “who’s this” and we ask things like “can you tell me what’s going to happen next” so we’re getting verbal answers. 

What’s important about this is this reaches right down to the tiniest babies up to quite advance four and five year olds when they’re giving a whole paragraph answer and the very young child is simply giving a look or a point and teachers learn to be very skillful in understanding all these child behaviours and it makes conversational reading quite different from different kinds of reading because it reaches right down to very young children and those young children give meaningful responses on every page. The teacher does something, the child does something. The teacher does something, the child does something.