Book Enrichment Activities
To deepen students’ engagement with books, the teacher leads the class in an enrichment activity each week. The activities are also great for parents to include in their home reading.
Dramatization:
A dramatization is acting out all or part of a story. Dramatizing books enhances comprehension and helps kids identify with characters, allowing them to “live” inside the story. Children get to dramatize several books during this program, and this is a great activity to try at home. Dramatizations can be as simple as taking a couple of pages and acting them out. Or, if this is an activity that parents and their children really get excited about, they can act out the whole story. They can use different voices, facial expressions, or even props and costumes. Siblings, friends, and family pets can also be great additions to the action.
Story Dictation:
An enjoyable way to reinforce a child’s connection with a book is to do some story-writing. Each week, the teacher assigns a story dictation that relates to the book read in class. Children respond to the prompt by making up a story. As the child tells the story, the parent writes down the words. Then the child illustrates the story in the space provided on the home practice pages. The parent reads the story aloud in a way that allows the child to see the words as they are read. When children see their own stories written down, they feel pride of authorship and begin to develop a connection to the written word. The teacher often reads a few completed stories out loud at the next class.
Choral and Shared Reading:
Choral reading and shared reading are ways for children to participate in reading before they are actually ready to do so on their own. In choral reading, children chime in as the teacher reads familiar or repeating lines in a story. In shared reading, children jump in to provide the next word in a familiar, repeating, or rhyming line in a story. (Children are not actually reading words during choral and shared reading, though this may begin to happen once a child starts learning to read.)
Parents can incorporate choral and shared reading into their reading at home. These activities work best with repeating lines and in favorite books that a child knows by heart. Another variation is to read a line, then ask the child to “echo” the same line back.
Art Projects:
Great picture books, like the ones read in class, engage children as much through the beautiful illustrations as through the story. As a result, they can inspire very creative art work from young children. The teacher leads the class in making Wild Thing masks in response to Maurice Sendak’s classic picture book, Where the Wild Things Are. Whenever children’s imagination is captured by the visual world of a book, creating artwork of their own helps them deepen their connection to the story.