Reading Prompt Cards
Dialogic reading is one of the best-evidenced things a parent can do for language: read the book with your child instead of to them. These cards give you the exact prompts, matched to the kind of book in your lap and your child's age.
The card deck
Filter to the book in your lap. One or two prompts per reading is plenty; this is seasoning, not a quiz.
Cards reference kinds of books and generic scenes, never specific titles, so they work with whatever is already on your shelf. Reading the same book again and again is fine; familiar books may make it easier for your child to join in.
Why this works
In the original dialogic reading study, parents were taught to turn reading into a conversation: ask open questions, expand on what the child says, and read less straight from the page. After about a month, their toddlers scored months ahead on tests of the words they used (Whitehurst et al., 1988, Developmental Psychology), and later studies found smaller but still real benefits. A meta-analysis found the added value of the interactive style was clearest for 2- and 3-year-olds (Mol et al., 2008, Early Education and Development), though later reviews did not find clear differences by age. The likely mechanism is the same serve-and-return engine behind everything on this site: books are a good conversation-holder, because the pictures keep you both looking at the same thing. Read the full evidence grade in our claims library.