Free · 18 months to 5 · Works with any book
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. The same book 400 times is not a rut; familiarity is what frees your child to do the talking.
Why this works
In the original dialogic reading experiments, parents were taught to prompt, follow the child's answer, expand it by a word, and hand the turn back. Children in those groups showed measurably larger expressive-language gains than children who were simply read to, within weeks (Whitehurst et al., 1988, Developmental Psychology). A meta-analysis later confirmed the added value of the interactive style, strongest for two- and three-year-olds (Mol et al., 2008, Early Education and Development). The mechanism is the same serve-and-return engine behind everything on this site: a book is simply the best conversation-holder ever invented, because the pictures pin joint attention in one place. Read the full evidence grade in our claims library.