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| The Toddler reading a completely age-appropriate book. |
2. Background knowledge and prior experience are critical to the reading experience.
What it means: when people read, they're drawing on what they already know in order to make sense of a text. This applies to little people as well as big people, and what you already know can be both a pull towards and a push away from enjoyment of reading.
The toddler in my life, for example, went to the fair this summer and saw cows. Now, when we read Moo, Baa, La, La, La, Goodnight Moon, or Each Peach Pear Plum, the toddler points to the cows and says, "Moo." Since the fair, every time she picks up a new book, she looks for another cow, which makes her pick up more new books, looking for more and more opportunities to say moo*.
On the other hand, lack of background knowledge can also be a push away from both understanding and enjoying reading. This can happen in relationship to many aspects of reading like vocabulary, content, and form.
As a middle school teacher, my students often wanted to read books that played with form, like, for example, a novel that told a story in multiple perspectives. If a student is expecting a book to tell the story from one character's point of view, turning the page to a new chapter and finding a new narrator using the word, "I" can be jarring. Because of that, I started asking my students to preview the books they read to build up their background knowledge about formatting before they read. Usually with books written in multiple voices, the author indicates who's speaking by a font change or by placing the name of the new narrator at the beginning of the chapter (2 examples: Flipped & Seedfolks). Once students identified that characteristic in one book, they generally could identify it in future books.
A few ideas for building up background knowledge with very young people like the Toddler:
Vocabulary: Pick a word that a child likes and focus on that word as you read the book, like the Toddler did with, "Moo." Some other words that the Toddler likes are: baby, boo, duck, Mama, Dada, balloon, and no. She really likes no. You might ask questions: Where's the baby? What do you see? You might stretch out the sounds of the words: NNnnnnnoooooooooo! Or, you might skip all the other words and focus on identifying the pictures that go with the fun word on each page ("There's the cow again!)
Content: Build up content knowledge by reading books that explore lots and lots of different experiences and perspectives. The 1000 Black Girl Books Resource Guide* is a database that lets you select books based on reading level, and We Need Diverse Books has a database app called Our Story with an interactive quiz for finding books.
Format: Very young people, like the Toddler, aren't super interested in reading the words. What they DO like to do is turn the page. So, if the Toddler wants to turn the pages backwards, I often read the book backwards. And, if the Toddler skips a page, I skip a page. And, if the Toddler turns the page early, I cut off what I'm saying. This might seem like she's not 'reading', but it's actually giving her important background knowledge on the relationship between the words and the page. Plus, sometimes I'm ok with finishing Goodnight Moon a little early.
Braunger, J. & Lewis, J.P. (2008). What we know about the learning and development of reading K-12: Thirteen core understandings about reading and learning to read. In S.B. Kucer (Ed.), What research really says about teaching and learning to read. Urbana, IL: NCTE.
* A note: She was very disappointed that there were no cows in Fahrenheit 451.
* Thank you to Jade Lee for pointing me to this database.
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