Teaching for theme is one aspect of reading comprehension that is often elusive for both teachers and students. Specifically, teachers are challenged with elevating students' thinking from the plot level to a more abstract level when teaching for theme understanding. Students are challenged with transitioning between the story world and the real…

Much attention has been paid to storybook reading as a context for supporting preschoolers' emergent language and literacy. Inferential thinking is essential to listening comprehension and to reading comprehension. Understanding the story deeply and reasoning about events and characters are central to children's enjoyment and to comprehension…

The author explores the Names, Journeys, and Dreams project, in which culturally and linguistically diverse learners and their families engaged with picturebooks that inspired dialogic conversations, authentic writing, and family-school connections. The author provides four recommendations for incorporating picturebooks within the reading support…

Theory and research have demonstrated the importance of teacher scaffolding to facilitate effective classroom conversations during shared book reading. When teachers scaffold conversations, young students can develop language skills more quickly. The authors describe a scaffolding framework and findings from research on how open-ended questions…

Given the emerging evidence on the importance of learning content-specific vocabulary in the early years, many early childhood teachers try to incorporate science vocabulary teaching as part of classroom activities. In this article, the authors argue for the importance of teaching science vocabulary in engaging ways using read-aloud and the…

In this Teaching Tips article, we discuss our efforts to create and utilize translanguaging interactive read-aloud videos as part of a community-wide reading program focused on the reading and discussing of a shared book. Offering translanguaging spaces for bilingual readers in area elementary classrooms and the community, these videos were…

Developing young children's vocabulary is essential for later reading success; thus, early childhood classrooms require a comprehensive vocabulary approach that teaches academic vocabulary. Yet even providing young children with child-friendly definitions of sophisticated words can be a challenge. First, the authors outline the components of a…

Students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) display social communication differences that may affect reading comprehension. The enjoyment of storybooks is a natural part of childhood. Students with ASD experience difficulty with understanding the thoughts and feelings of others, which may impede their comprehension of character motive in…

As mobile technologies such as tablets and smartphones offer opportunities to view stories in digital format, young readers are faced with new challenges in the reading task. The authors conducted an exploratory study of digital story applications on a mobile reading device and found that digital story applications are capable of taking large…

Children and their teacher participated in a project that explored the question of how engaging in transmediation after hearing a story might affect children's meaning construction. In this article we share our work with a teacher and her third graders as they were challenged to move from the traditional activity of drawing a picture about a story…

This article discusses the role picture books play in helping young writers. Third-grade students were read engaging picture books for the sole purpose of noticing and naming different features they encountered during the read-alouds. Students were able to recognize the tools many authors and illustrators use such as onomatopoeia, varied font…

Children's literature is on the digital move, and many of the new technologies are eye popping in terms of their aesthetic qualities. Books that are already beloved are moving into new spaces well beyond the combination of words and illustration, as movement, sound, and interactivity enter the scene. The purpose of this article is to explore…

Vocabulary development is critical for children's ability to learn to read and their success at school. Vocabulary has also been identified as a key factor in the achievement gap, with children from low-income families knowing significantly fewer words when they enter school. Although book reading has long been celebrated as an effective way for…

This article bridges research to practice by summarizing an interactive content-enriched shared book reading approach that Spanish-speaking parents of preschool-age children can easily use in the home to accelerate content vocabulary knowledge in Spanish. The approach was implemented in preschool classrooms using a transitional bilingual education…

There is a wide range in the educational qualities and overall quality of interactive storybook apps for tablet computers (ebooks). Minimally, ebooks for young children present illustrations on a screen, accompanied by an oral reading of the text. Today's ebooks can also include animation, zooming in and out, musical scores, sound effects,…