How To Make Your Kids Book Learnin’ Geniuses

Good morning, this is your practical put-to-use-right-away newsletter, for radical dads without a ton of extra time. Weekly, we crawl through the thorny bushes of research and pick the ripest berries for you to enjoy.

🍓 This week's ripe berry: A little extra into reading with your kids will get their genius juices flowing 🍓

How To Make Your Kids Book Learnin’ Geniuses

We all want our kids to be little geniuses.

The problem?

There is simply too much conflicting information surrounding the topic.

We are going to focus on one thing that has been proven to be beneficial to your children’s cognitive growth: Story Time.

More importantly, we will give you a less science-y version of the method developed by The Stony Brook Reading and Language Project to ensure your readings have the maximum cognitive benefits.

The Ask And Repeat Method

Not all stories are created equal.

While reading to your kid is always good, to get the most benefit from storytime, we would like to introduce you to a technique that encourages your kids to become the storyteller themselves.

This is not a listening exercise, but a conversation!

Here are the steps. Don’t worry, an example ahead!

Just remember to Ask and Repeat, and treat these steps as a loose guideline.

Ask

Ask your child a question about the story.

Size Up

Size Up your child’s response.

This will shape your response in the next section.

Add To

Here, ask your child another question that gets them to add to their answer.

Repeat

Have your child repeat the ‘add’.

An Example of Ask And Repeat!

You are reading a book about cats and their varied emotional states.

In the book, there is a photo of a cat looking incredibly sad.

Ask (a question):

You: What’s in this photo?

Kid: “A cat”

Size Up: You: Yes, my kid is correct! Wow, we’ve got a genius on our hands.

Add To: “Yes, you identified it's a cat! What do you notice about the cat?"

Maybe they say: "the cat is sad" or "the cat is white".

Repeat: “Can you say that’s a sad, white cat?”

“It’s a sad, white cat, dad!”

The Benefits Of Ask and Repeat Reading

The most obvious: by making reading an interactive experience, your kid will have more fun, and be more engaged.

While your kid is engaged, they are learning two important things: Vocab, and how to interact with a story.

The vocab aspect is obvious: as they expand their answer, you introduce new words and new perspective.

The other aspect is less obvious: by having a conversation with them about the book, you are teaching to them how to think critically about a book.

Look. This isn’t some hair-brained idea we invented.

This is hard science that we’ve adapted to make it easier to understand and implement.

So.

Make Story Time

1. More Fun

2. More Beneficial to their little noggins.

Go make a little Jimmy Neutron!

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