6 Awesome Ways to “Stretch” Your Kids’ Storybooks

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Picture it: You’re on a plane or train or bus or ferry with the children you care for (or - worse? - still waiting to board at a busy loading gate), and you notice their interest in the few toys and art supplies brought in their backpacks is starting to wane. Panic starts to niggle at your insides as you realise there is a lot more trip to go and not a lot more road ahead for those items keeping those kids occupied. You search your own bag, crestfallen to further realise that all you’ve got in there for them are a couple of storybooks they’ve had read to them dozens of times. How long do you have until the kids become bored? How much time do you need to kill? How embarrassing will their behaviour be when they can’t contain their discontent any longer? If you are a parent or caregiver and picturing this scene sends anxiety chills down your spine, fear not because we’ve got your back! Below are six ways to stretch a storybook you’d normally just straight read and be done with into an imagination-sparking, conversation-starting tool that could mean the difference between making your trip feel like a crawl, or literally fly by.

As a child of two teachers, story time at bedtime was never a quick event. My sister and I would sit on either side of one of our parents on their queen sized bed, snuggle in, and not only be treated to fun narrations of the actual words on the page but also games our Dad would make out of a book’s illustrations or words. Our Mum would often make learning a treat with personalised word-expanding vocabulary activities she would take us through, after a rousing, funny-voice performance of the book’s contents of course! We didn’t even realise at the time that we were learning; we were just having fun, quality time with Mum or Dad. But what they were actually doing was extending the use of the storybooks in creative ways that, unbeknownst to us in the moment, were expanding our reading comprehension, listening skills, and generally enriching our love of reading beyond the actual story within a given book’s cover.

1. Boost a child’s powers of observation by turning the illustrations into a game.

If you have a book with “busy” pictures, it’s very easy to turn the illustrations into a search-and-find game. This works great with little kids as well as their elder siblings. Our family’s go-to was Richard Scarry’s books such as “Best Word Book Ever”. Some may criticise the earlier versions of Scarry’s books for their heteronormative content but thankfully, newer, revised editions have corrected many issues such as showing mothers AND fathers cooking and doing housework, or showing women doing jobs such as fire fighting as opposed to just male characters, etc. In recent years the brand has actually produced specific seek-and-find products but I prefer my Dad’s tried and true method of taking a book with high-content illustrations, and after reading the actual story on the page, pausing to ask one of us, “Now, can YOU see-eeeeeeee…” letting his voice turn into vocal fry on the “eeeee” and sometimes drawing it out so long he’d run out of breath before finishing his question with something like, “...a single red sock?” Laughing all the way through a book with Dad, even if the book wasn’t necessarily written to be especially hilarious, is a cherished core memory for both my sister and I and it certainly aided in building our powers of observation.

2. Boost a child’s listening and attention skills by reading some of the words wrong on purpose.

This works great with younger kids who have heard a certain story many times, or an older child who is already learning to read for themselves. The idea is for the child to be lulled into the sweet relaxation of having a story read to them only to be jerked into laughter and the delight of having to “correct” the adult reading to them. For younger children, pick a key word, a character name, or the like, which will be a more obvious mistake for them to correct. For older children you can choose more subtle words or phrases to change such as adverbs or similes. For example, instead of saying “She tiptoed into the room quietly” you can change the adverb “quietly” to “She tiptoed into the room thunderingly”. Or if it were written as a simile such as “She tiptoed into the room as silently as a ghost” you can say “as crashingly as a marching band”. Bonus points if the child can physically point to the word or words on the page that you “got wrong” and “prove” it to you. And if you act flabbergasted that you got it wrong, they’ll probably laugh harder.

3. Inspire a child’s creativity and exercise their acting skills by having them plan out the voices for the characters with you.

Before you read the story you can assess as a pair or group how many characters the book has and assign voices to them. Take a look at the illustrations or read the character descriptions and ask “Do you think this character would sound old, or young? Would they speak fast, or slow? Would they have a higher voice/lower/clear/muffled/scratchy and gravely/smooth?” and so on. If one or more of the children is old enough to read, they can perform a certain character’s voice when their dialogue comes up.

4. Boost a child’s vocabulary and recall skills by creating a personalised word bank with them after the book is finished.

Our Mum used to take old computer punch cards (a.k.a. Hollerith cards. It was the 1980s and, nerd alert, our Dad was an early-adopter of computers!) and reuse them to make word cards with us at bedtime. It felt special to be asked by an important grownup about words we wanted to know how to spell or just wanted to see written down. We’d take turns saying one word each, and she’d write one word per card with a super smelly, satisfyingly saturated, black felt teacher’s marker in perfect primary teacher handwriting. Over time we’d have a collection of “our words” and read through them together once we each had collected a decent stack. (To this day I know one of my cards said ‘watermelon’. Maybe it was from an aforementioned Richard Scarry book after all - watermelon does show up in a lot of Scarry’s books!) You can ask your child what were some words they recall from the story generally, or ask what was their favourite word or words from the story, ask them what letter it starts with, and then write it down so they can see the word that was in their memory make it out of their head and onto paper.

5. Explore bilingualism (or multilingualism) by using bilingual or monolingual storybooks.

If you know a second language, pique the child’s curiosity about additional languages by having you translate some or all of the book so they can hear what the story sounds like in a different language. You can have them choose single words they want to hear in your additional language or you can read a line of text in the additional language first and have them guess what it means by using the illustrations for context. If the child knows a second language, you can of course challenge them to translate some or all of the text to you.

Books that are already bilingual are also a great tool for spending more time engaging with text. For example, in the case of our storybooks from Little Crab Educational Press (LCEP) such as Little Byron - Xiǎo Bái Rèn - 小白任 or Let's Pretend! - Ràng Wǒmen Jiǎxiǎng - 让 我们 假想!, our exclusive Text Scaffolding system allows parents and caregivers to explore Mandarin Chinese Characters, Pinyin (the “romanization” of Chinese for foreign learners) and English simultaneously by showing both languages and the pronunciation on the same page, stacked together in relevant groups instead of separated as so many other bilingual books do. Moreover, all LCEP storybooks come with a reading guide, grammar notes, and glossary at the back which make them excellent “activity stretchers” compared to most other books. Check out our FAQ at littlecrabpress.ca to learn more about our Text Scaffolding. 

6. Expand a child’s reading comprehension by asking them story-extending questions.

The old way of teaching reading comprehension involved asking primarily fact-based questions which only require the skill of scanning for details (such as dates or place names) and does not really require actual understanding of the story. So, instead, we’ve taken inspiration for our final idea from Adrienne Gear, a Canadian teacher who has written a preeminent series of books on teaching reading. Her flagship book on how to teach fiction, Reading Power (based on the research of David Pearson and influenced by Stephanie Harvey), “...provides students with the tools to become more thoughtful and meaningful readers as well as how to become “meta-cognitive” or aware of their thinking while they read.” In the travel scenario described in our introduction, you are reading to the child as opposed to the child reading to themselves but asking them intelligent questions during or after the story will still help them to practice making valuable observations which in turn will help them be better readers when they are doing it on their own, and again, it will eat up more of that potentially scary down time!

Adrienne Gear talks about the three levels of understanding text, which are:

• Level 1 – LITERAL (retelling, summarizing, text features, determining most important ideas)
• Level 2 - INTERACTIVE (connecting, visualizing, questioning, inferring)
• Level 3 - INTEGRATED (synthesizing, transforming, re-thinking)

In order to bring emerging readers up to the second and third levels of thinking, Gear teaches about the five “reading powers” for fiction: connecting, questioning, visualising, inferring and transforming. We will delve deeper into the five reading powers in the future because they really deserve their own post but for now here is some inspiration for how to form extension questions with even just a surface understanding of these concepts:

• To develop “Level 1” thinking, you can obviously ask the child to retell the story back to you in their own words.
• For “Level 2” thinking, such as with the “connecting” power, if the story lends itself well to making sense of the text in terms of events and people in the child’s own life or reminds them of something they have experienced, you can ask a question as simple as, “Does (this moment in/element of the story) remind you of a similar experience you have had in your life? Tell me about it!” Another example of Level 2 thinking would be the “visualising” power, which is often exercised well when reading books about places, weather, or seasons that are filled with rich, descriptive, and vivid language. You can ask something like “When I read that, could you (see/taste/smell/feel/hear) anything happening in the scene? Was it something the author wrote or did your mind add it to the scene in the story?”
• For “Level 3” thinking, the “transforming” power refers to when readers become transformed by what they read. In other words, books have the ability to change the way we think about ourselves and our world and some stories allow readers to be touched in some way by the words on the page, the thoughts in their heads, and the feelings in their hearts. If the books you have on hand lend themselves well to questions about how the reader may have been changed by them, you can ask something like, “Before we read this story, how did you feel about (a topic in the book). Do you feel differently now? What happened in the story that made you feel differently (or why not?)?”

Ideally the other key words above (summarizing, text features, determining most important ideas, questioning, inferring, synthesizing, or re-thinking) will spark other ideas for questions you can ask to keep the learning ball rolling and the “awareness that we are waiting for something and waiting is boring” feeling at bay.

Are you feeling more inspired for the next time you sit down to read with one of your littles? Do you have any go-to strategies you would add to this list? Let us know via email or on Instagram (we'd love to see photos of what your family is currently reading - tag us @littlecrabpress)!

Keep the inspiration rolling with a free, ready-to-go list of prompt questions we have made for you to extend your kid lit. Click here to get the freebie!

Happy reading and bon voyage!