Every Book is an Early Childhood Book

In this Every Book Counts webinar, host Erin Bailey welcomes Dr. Jill Pentimonti, Associate Research Professor at the University of Notre Dame and Executive Director of Research Advancement, to explore shared book reading as one of the most powerful tools for building young children's language, vocabulary, and comprehension skills. Dr. Pentimonti explains the essential building blocks of early reading success—word recognition and language comprehension—and how shared book reading uniquely supports pre-reading skills including print knowledge, phonological awareness, and oral language development. She emphasizes that reading is not a simple process but requires building neural pathways through deliberate practice and instruction, and that decades of research confirm shared book reading's significant impact on children's literacy outcomes when done interactively.

The session provides practical, evidence-based strategies for making shared reading more intentional and engaging, including asking open-ended questions, building vocabulary with child-friendly definitions, pointing out initial sounds and letters, and having conversations before, during, and after reading. Dr. Pentimonti stresses the importance of reading a balanced diet of both narrative books (which build story structure and comprehension strategies) and information books (which introduce technical vocabulary, content knowledge, and text features like tables of contents and indexes). She demonstrates these strategies through a live read-aloud of "A Den for Bay Bay," showing how even a simple information book with few words can spark rich conversations about letters, vocabulary, and real-world knowledge. The webinar concludes with resources from Reading is Fundamental to help educators and families implement these high-impact strategies in their daily reading routines.

About Dr. Jill Pentimonti:
Dr. Jill Pentimonti is an Associate Research Professor in the Institute for Educational Initiatives and the Executive Director of Research Advancement in the Office of the Vice President for Research at the University of Notre Dame, where she also leads the Early Learning Foundations (ELF) Lab. Her work focuses on language, literacy, and learning in the preschool and early elementary years. 

Dr. Pentimonti’s research centers on supporting young children’s language and literacy development, particularly for those at risk for reading difficulties. She has led multiple large-scale, federally funded studies examining classroom practices, instructional supports, and interventions that foster children’s early learning. Her work has also advanced the use of innovative tools and methods—including AI-powered assessments—to better understand and improve early learning experiences for children, families, and teachers.

What is Reading Inspires by Reading Is Fundamental?

Reading Inspires is Reading Is Fundamental’s new podcast celebrating the power of books and the joy of reading. Each episode invites educators, librarians, families, authors, illustrators, and all who champion children’s literacy to explore one big question: What does reading inspire for you? Through engaging conversations and storytelling, Reading Inspires bridges the gap between research and real-world practice—showing what literacy looks and feels like in classrooms, libraries, and homes. Grounded in evidence yet open-ended in approach, this is a space for curiosity and connection. Whether you’re an educator seeking fresh ideas, a parent hoping to spark a love of reading, or simply a lifelong bookworm, you’ll find inspiration, practical insights, and stories that remind us all why reading matters—and how it changes lives.

Erin Bailey: welcome everyone.

We're so glad that you're here for our.

Next every book counts webinar.

Um, this specific one is every book is a early childhood book, so if you've joined us before, welcome back and if you haven't, um, this is your first time.

We're so excited to have you, so today's session is focused on sharing, uh, shared book reading.

One of the most powerful ways to build young children's language.

Vocabulary and comprehension skills.

So today we'll explore evidence-based strategies that make shared reading more interactive, intentional, and inclusive, along with practical ways to boost engagement, encourage rich talk, and support early literacy development.

Um, we'll also get to discuss how to select a variety of books across genres, cultures, and topics.

To strengthen these shared reading experiences and help all children see themselves in the stories that they hear.

And especially excited tonight.

'cause we have a, um, read aloud, uh, that we will be able to read a story and practice some of these strategies, um, tonight.

So feel free to enjoy if you have any kiddos around you that would love to hear or read a lot of the story.

Mm-hmm.

Feel free to drag them in and for that portion.

But super excited for all of the content for tonight.

Um, and if you're new, uh, we are Reading is Fundamental, the nation's largest children's literacy nonprofit.

Um, our, our mission is to inspire the joy of reading and ensure every child has the opportunities and resources to become a lifelong reader.

And these free webinars are a part of our ongoing commitment to supporting educators and families with the practical tools and strategies they need to bring literacy to life.

Um, tonight we're thrilled to be joined by Dr. Pil.

Jill Penta, associate Research Professor.

Professor.

Oh my gosh, what is, it's been a long day y'all in the Institute for Educational Initiatives and the Executive Director of Research Advancement at the University of Notre Dame, where she also leads the, uh, early learning foundations or ELF Lab.

Her work FO focuses on language literacy and learning in the preschool and early elementary years.

Dr. Penta Monte's research centers on supporting young children's language and literacy development, particularly for those at risk with reading, for reading difficulties.

She has led multiple large scale federally funded studies examining.

Classroom practices, instructional supports, and interventions that strengthen early learning.

Her work also advances the use of innovative tools and methods, um, including AI powered assessments to better understand and improve early learning experiences for children, families, and teachers.

And on top of all of those amazing things, she also serves on.

Um, early Childhood Education advisory board.

So a lot of what, uh, resources we'll share tonight, um, were guided under her expertise, so I get the opportunity to learn from her all the time.

So I'm excited to share that opportunity with you guys tonight.

So with that, I'm gonna turn it over to you, Dr. Penta Monte, and I'm gonna stop sharing my screen so you can share your.

Jill P: Thank you.

It's so great to be here with everyone tonight.

Um, and I just, I have to confess, shared book reading and talking about shared book reading is my absolute favorite thing.

Um, I've started off my career as an early childhood teacher, so I taught preschool and I taught kindergarten and shared book reading was my absolute favorite part of the day.

I loved it.

It first.

So many reasons.

So when I went into research and realized all the benefits of it that I'll talk about today, I was just thrilled that something that I loved so dearly, um, had so much great sort of work behind it and showed so much support for kids skills.

So today we'll really talk about the essential building blocks of early reading success, all of those things that we can be doing early to set kids up on that right path.

To becoming really successful readers.

Um, and then how shared book reading, as I mentioned, is one of those really great tools we can use to fuel young children's reading development.

And then I'll go into some specifics on how we can have some powerful and easy to use strategies.

That's what I love about all of these.

All of these are easy to use and they're super high impact.

It's really spectacular for those reasons, right?

So it's kind of the, the what, why, and how is what I'll go through for you all tonight.

Um, okay.

So just starting through into those essential skills, those early block, early reading, those blocks that we need for early reading success.

So when we talk about reading and sort of what we need to be to, to, to sort of gather to be a skilled reader.

We often talk about this simple view of reading.

The cool part of becoming a successful reader is there are really two big concepts that you need to conquer, that you need to understand really well.

The first is word recognition.

The understanding of how to read a word off the page.

When you see the word cat, you know the C says cut.

The A says Ah.

The T says T. You blend those sounds together.

It says cat, right?

And that's word recognition.

So once you've got that and are doing that automatically, you also need to understand what you're reading.

So the language and the comprehension pieces of that, when you put those things together, you are a successful reader.

So it's really nice that there are two massive building blocks to becoming a successful reader.

So that's why we call it the simple view of reading.

There is a, however to this, right?

It is not so simple.

So let me show you the next slide, which thinks about all of the underlying skills that go within those two big buckets.

Right?

When you we, when I just talked about how to read the word cat off that page, you needed to know what those letter names were.

You needed to know those letter sounds.

You needed to understand how to blend them just.

In your sort of listening and the sound elements of that, that's called phonological awareness.

You can't decode or read that word until you do that.

And there's some words like the and was that we see a lot and are very irregular.

You just need to know by sight.

So it's really complex and you need to become increasingly automatic at that before you can move to really thinking about what you're reading.

And that language comprehension piece has a ton of elements too.

You've gotta understand the background knowledge of what you're reading.

If you're reading about some topic that you don't know anything about, and the words you don't know, vocabulary, don't know, it'll be really hard to comprehend.

If you don't understand the structure of our language, what verbs mean and adverbs, that's hard to, if you can't make connections or verbal reasoning before between what you're
reading or you don't understand, sort of the way a book is laid out, like an information text or a textbook for example, all of that's gonna make it hard for you to comprehend, right?

So my point is, it is not really the simple thing.

And what this also means is there's a lot going on in our brains when we're learning to read.

All of that takes a lot of areas of our brain, and I promise I won't talk about the brain too much.

I'm not a neuroscientist, but I am fascinated by how we become readers because it's really cool what's happening in our brain.

So we'll just point out sort of that green portion at the bottom, this language comprehension piece.

There's one piece of your brain that's working on that language comprehension, but all those other pieces I've pointed out in this visual
here, the speech sound, sound symbol, connection letter, word connection, you see happening in all those other parts of your brain.

That's what you need for that word kick recognition piece.

So you've gotta build these pathways between the pieces of your brain for this reading thing to work.

What's really cool is that when we practice things, we are actually literally building neural pathways.

We're actually building stronger brains when we're teaching kids and when we're talking to kids about reading.

I think that's really pretty amazing.

So.

The, the idea and the sort of reality is that we know how brains read and that's fantastic.

So we also know how to teach in a way that changes, actually changes and builds brain activity.

When we, our brains actually change.

We learn to read, which it's great.

However, to do that, to strengthen those neural pathways, you can't just be surrounded by things, right?

We need deliberate practice and we need instruction in really key skills that we know are building those, those pathways, right?

The als the next set of good news.

You know, not only sort of understanding how our brain works, but we also know from decades of research those skills that we can be working on early.

And by early, I mean in pre-K, in K, to really set kids up.

To be successful readers, and you'll see these things again, print knowledge, phonological awareness, oral language.

We know that when kids have those things down, they enter, you know, formal reading instruction with those things solid in their brains, they become successful readers.

And the cool thing is we see this in what I just talked about and how we know we learn to read.

Oral language, phonological awareness, understanding those sounds of language and being able to blend and print knowledge, right?

Understanding the sounds that the names of letters and the sounds they make.

So all really coming together.

So that we know what it is we need to be working on with kids to have them be successful readers.

So what's a good way to do this?

The good news is shared book reading is a spectacular way to support these pre-reading skills.

Why?

So when you think about shared book reading.

It builds children's vocabulary knowledge.

What a spectacular way to say what a word means.

You've got usually a picture of it and a picture book.

You've got a story around it so you have context to explain the word.

This is a fantastic way to talk about vocabulary knowledge, and there is was in sort of our more complex way that we learn to read, we know that language comprehension piece and vocabulary is key to becoming a successful reader.

Understanding narrative sweets.

Again, part of this language comprehension, the concept of before, during, and after can be really abstract.

We can't show you sort of a visual of that, right?

It's not an item, so it's abstract.

But when you're reading a story and you talk about what happened before, during, and after, this whole really cool story that the kids has just been read, you get that concept.

It's a great way to build that piece of comprehension.

And here we go with this.

This phonological awareness I said was another key piece of it is exposes children to rhyme and other interesting sound patterns.

I bet we can all think of about a million children's books that rhyme, a ton of them rhyme, and that gets kids listening to the sounds of language, which then help them do things like blend sounds when they're reading a word.

All of that is very related and a great way to practice it in a really fun way for kids.

And here's the print knowledge piece that I mentioned.

It exposes children to letters, words, other units of print.

What better way to talk about letters than reading an alphabet book?

There are so many cool ones out there.

This one that has animals in it, right?

And you're talking about letters.

You're pointing out letters.

You're having really deliberate conversations about the names and the sounds of letters.

The other piece of reading books is the content of them can be so rich and beautiful teaching children about the world they live in.

I have this book, I stink on it because when I was teaching preschool, it was one of my kids' favorite books.

They loved it and we had a lot of conversation about the importance of trash collection while reading a really funny, silly, fun book, right?

So great to teach about the.

The world that kids live in, and what a beautiful way to teach children important concepts about the size society, which we live in, the people around the cultures.

Um, some really wonderful things you can start conversation about with kids when you're doing shared book reading.

So all of this brings together, again, like I said, when I sort of moved into research from teaching and realized, hey, there are
decades of research that show this activity that I know the kids in my classroom loved, I know that I loved, can be really good for them.

In fact, these really big studies that bring together all the research that happened across decades, we call them meta-analysis.

Show that when kids participate in these shared book reading experiences, it can explain significant portions of why they have higher skills or higher scores in language and literacy.

And I think that's really exciting 'cause it isn't a tough activity.

There's lots of little ways we can make it fantastic and this is a great way to support kids' skills.

There is a, however, right, and I just said this, it's the key to the effectiveness or making this impactful to kids skills is it's not just slipping pages.

It's not just reading words off pages.

It's the interactive nature of that shared book reading.

It's the back and forth and the conversation, the pointing out of text that happens when adults and children sit down and read a book together.

So that brings me to sort of my last section of this is, so we've got the what we wanna really support kids reading skills.

We know how to do that.

We know how the brain works.

Shared booking is a great way to do it, but there's a how piece to make sure this really impactful opportunity, the shared book reading experience can be as meaningful as it possibly can.

Another piece of good news is it's really.

Not super hard.

It doesn't take tons of materials or time or funds, but it does take some tweaks to what we're doing in our shared book reading to make sure we're being impactful.

So when we think about some of the key components we can work with to make it more impactful, I always think about it as there's things about the book, the choice of book, I'll talk in a minute.

But I'm really focused too.

The other piece of it is this conversation that happens between adults and children.

So I'm gonna start there with this component, and that's happening before, during, and after reading.

Right?

That conversation.

So what I love about this is, first of all, we have an amazing guide from Reading is Fundamental that does just, that takes a book and shows you some really cool ideas of things you could say before, during, and after a read aloud.

And so I always like to think about it in this way before the book.

What you're gonna wanna do is draw children's attention, the title.

Great way to point out print, talk about the letters and the title, talk about the sounds that they make, and then the comprehension piece.

Help get them excited about the book.

Ask them what they think it's gonna be about.

Ask them what they know about that topic, build that background knowledge.

One of those things I was saying is really important to to listening comprehension or language comprehension during it is a fantastic time to ask questions about what you're reading, checking for, understanding.

Giving explanations, posing questions to get kids using their language.

The best way to build language in kids is to have them use it and practice it, right?

Encourage their responses, retelling what they're happening, making predictions, and just getting that, that sort of.

Ability for them to think, I have contributions I wanna make while we're reading this book.

I'm gonna talk about it.

Right?

Getting that in their head is that the way we read books together, we talk about them, and then after you can pose prompts, ask questions to support any new vocabulary learned.

Recall any of those facts, build that li listening and language comprehension draw connections to kids' lives because when things make sense to them and they're connected to their lives, they're definitely gonna remember them.

Right?

So there's all sorts of really rich things that can be talked about that conversation before, during, and after a read.

So I just wanted to show a few examples in each of those, sort of three key areas I said was really important for reading development, and show you some example prompts just to give an example of like how easy this is, right?

These are tweaks, and just making sure you're asking some really good connection questions.

So this first one, in building language, I've said open-ended questions.

And the reason we like open-ended questions so much is because open-ended questions are the ones you can't answer in one word.

It's not a yes or a no.

You've really gotta think, and you've really gotta use language.

And again, kids using more language, practicing that is really what's gonna build that muscle and build that skill.

Right?

So a question is.

Why do you think the turtle tucked his head in a shell?

You can't answer that in one word.

You gotta think about it and use some language.

What do you think is gonna happen next?

Books are the perfect place to get predictions out of kids, right?

And then, like I mentioned, building vocabulary, right?

These are such books and shared book reading is such a good way to point out a new word and then use it right away and show why.

Understanding and knowing the meaning of that word is important, right?

Because you wanna understand what's happening in the story.

You better learn that new word, right?

That building of vocabulary.

And I always like thinking about sort of what would be a good child friendly definition to words.

I have to do some thinking about that before I read.

Sometimes I pick up some vocabulary books.

We'll talk about that.

Or words.

Talk about that in a minute, but for example, in the very hungry Caterpillar, great way to talk about a cocoon.

It's a soft bed or a soft covering for a caterpillar while it changes.

It's like a little sleeping bag for a caterpillar while it changes.

I like that example because it gives you kind of more technical definition and then brings it back to something kids will really understand.

Another really great resource that reading is fundamentalist has, uh, which I think is spectacular in a really good way to do vocabulary knowledge, is bringing out vocabulary cards too.

So this is something, a word you could introduce during a read aloud and have those vocabularies cards out for kids.

'cause that visual connection is always gonna be great for kids in vocabulary learning.

So the next one is phonological awareness.

We talked a lot about how important initial sounds are, and pointing out sounds in the words and pointing out letters and books is
a great way to really build that muscle of understanding and listening to the sounds of language and being able to manipulate them.

So when it comes to decoding a word like cat, you're able to blend those sounds together.

So a great way to do it is point out initial sounds.

We just talked about the word moon.

In this book, say, moon with me.

Moon starts with the letter M. That makes that mm sound, let's all say that together.

And then later on in the day try to point out other words that start with the MM sound.

And another really great resource that reading it Fundamental has is this chart of letters and the sounds that they make and pictures of, of words that start with that.

And this is a great way to make connections.

If you're reading, you can say, oh, I saw the A like on our chart.

That's like the sound apple starts with, right?

What other words can we that start with a right?

Having those conversations and building that into kids' vocabulary.

Another way is you can play with sounds, right?

Getting kids to think about, oh, these sounds can be taken apart, right?

Because that's what they're doing when they're playing and listening and decoding and segmenting words too.

So taking this word says box, take part.

The word away box without that B sound is ox.

No.

You try it playing with those sounds while you're reading.

'cause you've got everybody's attention and you're thinking about some of those same words.

And then print knowledge is great too.

It's not only sort of the names of letters.

We talk about that a lot when we think about print knowledge, but kids need to learn how print works in a book too.

And this is a great way to show them pointing to the print as you're reading and having them help you do that too.

Come help me read this text.

What word am I gonna read next?

Can you point that out to me?

So it really gets in their head sort of the way print works in books.

And then of course, like I said, finding and pointing out letter names is wonderful and some books lend themselves so well to that too 'cause the print is really big or the letters are really interesting.

Those alphabet books are perfect for this.

Come.

And having kids come and point to letters in the books is always super helpful.

So when I'm thinking about this, you know, I think about a lot of little organizational tips.

There's so much that can be done.

All of those are easy things to do.

But how do you organize yourself, right?

So I always like to take a flip through the book before I read aloud and think about, okay, what are some good things?

What's a good word here?

That I might wanna teach.

What's some good vocabulary words and think about a quick definition or what is some, this has got some really cool letters in it.

The text is very cool.

I'm gonna start to point out some of that.

Or there's some rhyming words.

Let's talk about that.

Or there's some alliteration, meaning there's a lot of words that start with the same sound.

I can really focus on that.

Think about that and do a little planning.

Doesn't have to take a ton of time, but a little planning, right?

Choose those times that you're gonna do that, and obviously you don't wanna ask too many questions, so you're not getting the story out, but sort of balance that and think through it.

One thing I like to do is use sticky notes to remind myself of those good ideas.

Then I don't forget them.

And then I also have that sense of like balance, like, okay, I'm asking a good amount of questions during this shared book reading and reread.

Kids love to hear the same books again.

I know if we've, if anyone is interacting with kids around here, they know kids love to read these books again, do it again because one day you might wanna focus on vocabulary the next day.

You might wanna point out print in the book the next day.

You might wanna talk about rhyming words.

It doesn't all have to get dawn in the same shared work reading.

And then sort of the next section, and this is like the.

Think carefully about the books you were choosing.

So let's talk about that.

That's that second key component, right?

Reading Trin types of books matter.

So why they really can have a dramatic impact on the resulting interactions with the book.

And they might encourage different types of learning.

And we've seen this, again, this is sort of the decades of research has shown this.

When you're reading an alphabet book.

Of course, you're naturally gonna talk about letters when you're reading a really good story.

Of course, you're gonna naturally talk about what's happening next and the before, the during, the after.

But also there's these book information books, the ones that are truly about.

Facts about animals, about science, about all different things that don't really have a story that are also really important.

Right.

And just to sort of note too of something from research is kids are exposed to a lot of storybooks and that's great.

Don't want to stop that.

But we also need to get a little bit more of these information books in with kids, and I'll talk about why in a minute.

Because what we know from research and what we see happening in early childhood classrooms typically.

Is kids are reading more narrative books and not as many information books.

So we'll talk about sort of the, the benefits of both of those here.

So first let's start with narrative.

Like I said, reading narrative books really help with this story structure.

It's a really good opportunity for getting kids to be thinking about comprehension strategies when they're later on and they're doing
sort of their own reading, their real skilled readers comprehension is that muscle they're gonna have to use over and over again.

So reading loud narrative books is perfect practice for it.

So ideas that you can, from that research, we know that's really helpful.

Point out the beginning, middle, and end.

Talk about story related vocabulary.

The word character, the word setting, teach that to kids early.

They're gonna have to use it later on in their schooling.

So if they're comfortable with that sooner, that's fantastic.

Encourage them to make predictions and summarize what they just read.

Again, they're gonna be asked to do that later in their schooling career.

If they get a practice doing that, well, they're doing some shared book reading with you, the adult or the classroom teacher.

Spectacular, right?

So for example, a little activity could do is make a story map.

Use the words characters, and setting while you're doing that.

Talk about it as a new word that they learned.

Have them repeat it, use it in follow up activities so that all that vocabulary is really new for them.

So then I'm gonna move to information books again, those ones that really are fact based exposure to them.

A lot of really cool vocabulary.

Lots of technical vocabulary.

The kids love to learn, especially if it's a topic they're super interested in, like dinosaurs, right?

Um, content area, knowledge.

They're learning new things as they're reading.

Again, if this is an area of interest, they're gonna soak that up.

And then something I think is really important, I like to call tech structure knowledge, which is that information books don't look like story books.

They actually look different, right?

Because often they have things like real pictures with labels on them, or bolded words, right?

Or tables of content or indexes and you know, what else looks like that?

Your textbooks, right?

And so when you are that skilled reader or a third and fourth grade and you get to a textbook, none of that text structure will look different to you.

You know that you've been exposed to it when you've done book shared book reading in your early childhood classroom, and you feel really comfortable with that structure, that's just gonna help with comprehension too.

And of course, reading interest and engagement, a topic is definitely a thing with these information books.

We can definitely capture kids' interest when we read different books about different topics.

So some ideas about, so that research of what, what we know is really important about these information books, you can provide content related book, have instruction you can activate sort of the knowledge they know about that.

What do you know about dinosaurs, right?

What do you wanna know?

That's what scientists do, right?

And like having those conversations about that content and then revisiting that content after you've read.

And then obviously choosing books that are really interesting to your class are definitely gonna help you with this.

So some ideas, taking out those books and showing them the really cool TE text features.

Why is there this table of content here?

Oh, I see.

On page four it talks about teals.

Let's go to page four, right?

Show them what that looks like, why there's an index, why there are picture labels.

And the nice thing about information books, some of them have a lot of words, right?

And I think that's why it's kind of hard to think about it as a shared book reading experience, but you don't have to read every single page.

'cause it's not a story with a before, during, and after.

Right?

You can read just a couple of pages, have kids choose from the table of contents, what pages you're gonna read, show them that these
books are different and you don't have to spend 45 minutes, which is impossible to get kids of this age sitting down for that long.

Right?

You don't have to sit and read the whole thing.

You can just do sessions of it and, and picture and pieces of it, which I think is really nice about that.

Okay.

So given that I've just talked about the importance of different types of books and, and how it's really important to be thinking about having these
different types of books in the classroom, I wanted to share a read aloud and I'll, and I'll, um, stop sharing in a minute and just show my screen.

Of what I think is a really good information book, especially in for an early childhood classroom.

And I wanted to share too that this read aloud is shared with permissions from teacher creative materials.

I wanna say huge.

Thank you for giving us the rights to, to feature this book.

I really like these books 'cause they've got real pictures.

You can talk about real facts that are happening.

Um, and I'll show you some features in a minute.

They make things easy for you.

I'll, I'll show you as I'm reading through this, but just to give you a preview of some of the things I'm gonna do, they a, they give you some
questions that are really good questions to ask kids while you're reading and they also have words really clearly labeling these pictures.

Awesome.

To talk about print, even talk about beginning sounds and awesome to show these sort of real pictures of what's happening with this one's about Bebe the panda.

Right?

What's happening in the, in this, in this pandas world.

Um, so with that, I'm gonna stop sharing for a minute and just kind of walk through what a shared book reading session with this book might look like.

And again, I think this is a really nice, um, example too.

Not only 'cause it's an information book, we can think through that, that too, but that it's a book that doesn't even actually have a story or that many words, but you can get a ton of conversation out of it.

So I'll just show that as I'm doing this aloud.

Okay, so if we can see, all right, so the title of my book is A Den for Bay Bay.

And what, look at this.

I see two of the same letter.

What letter is this?

Yep, I see two Bs.

B makes the B sound.

So it's Bay Bay.

This is great.

What do we think this book's gonna be about?

Yeah, I bet it's a panda.

What do you think he's eating?

Okay.

Should we find out a little bit more about Bebe the Panda?

All right.

Okay.

So this is his den where he lives.

And look what's in here.

It looks big.

Bebe has some trees.

Here's the word trees.

And here's some pictures of bebe and trees.

What is he doing?

Yeah, it looks like he's climbing that tree.

Have you ever climbed a tree?

Looks like so much fun.

That's in his den.

What a great thing to have in your den.

And here's the word hammock.

Here's the hammock.

A hammock is like a bed.

Baby sleeps on a hammock.

What's cool about hammocks is they're usually outside and they're hung from trees.

Has anyone been in a hammock?

Does it sound like fun to sleep in a hammock?

I bet it would be really comfy.

Right?

So that's a new word, and that's that word hammock.

Let's all say hammock together.

Okay?

Look, there's some rocks and there's definitely rocks in bay bays.

Ben Den, does he look like he's high up?

He does.

How do you think he got there?

Climbing.

Have you ever climbed up rocks?

Looks like a fun thing to do, and here's grass and he's got some grass.

I wonder if he's munching on that grass.

Do you think he's going to eat that grass?

What kinds of things do you like to eat?

He might have a snack.

What's your favorite kind of snack?

He might have grass for a snack.

And here's a new word too.

That word says mural.

And here's baby.

He's got a painting.

A mural is like a very, very big painting.

So that's, that's not a real tree, that's a painting.

Looks like baby has a very big mural.

What do you think he's doing in front of his mural?

So look like he's taking a nap.

He's probably pretty tired taking a nap.

Ah, and here's snow.

Oh my goodness.

It must have snowed in den.

I love that word.

Snow.

Say snow with me.

Snow starts with the S or the S sound.

Do you know any other words that start with S

And here's a ball.

Looks like he's got a ball in here.

Wait a minute.

There's the lowercase B. Where did we see an uppercase B?

Where did we hear that but sound that the B makes.

That's right.

It was on our title 'cause Bebe's name starts with A B. Can somebody come point to A B for me?

Can someone point to another B for me?

Those are the uppercase Bs.

Alright, can someone come point to the lowercase B for me?

Oh my goodness.

Lots of Bs.

Think.

And here's cameras.

There's some cameras watching.

Babe.

Babe.

You know who those people are watching.

It's scientists and scientists likes to know about the world, so they're learning all about Bebe when he's in, so that they can tell us really cool things about Pandas.

Scientists are great.

All right, so now I'm gonna read some questions for you.

How is Bebe's Den like it would be in nature, in the real world kinds of things.

Do you want to turn to the page?

Yeah.

I bet you that he had had trees in his world.

Why are there toys in Bay based in, why do you think, I bet he likes to play with toys.

Do you guys like toys?

What's your favorite?

Yeah, he had a ball.

You like one too?

Okay.

So that you can just see from even where a book with just a few words.

Right?

It had a ton of things to talk about, a ton to point out, and a ton to, to, to point out in regard to sort of those skills we know are most important during a shared book reading and a lot of good content knowledge too.

So sort of my tips when we think about that component of shared book reading is a balanced diet of.

It's the best way to go.

Make sure you've got both narrative information, books.

And here's yet another read resource from Reading is Fundamental.

A little sort of log of the types of books you're using.

You know, remembering what it is that you read, remembering what you liked about it, making sure you've got that really nice balanced diet of reading.

And one more sort of resource, a whole website of really great things and some of the things that I mentioned, um, during this webinar today that you can get on the website and reading is fundamental.

And with that, I will stop conversation open to questions.

And I've put my email here too.

I am always happily, clearly, I am always happy to talk about shared book reading, so thanks for having me here tonight.

Erin Bailey: Oh my gosh.

Thank you Jill.

I'm copying and pasting your email 'cause I definitely want folks to have it in the chat.

Um, and I was just smiling ear to ear.

This is so much fun and it looks like in the chat, um, toddler approved webinar, so it looks like we had a toddler join us.

I love it.

Fantastic.

Jill P: I mean, food doesn't look bay babe, bro.

I mean what a cute panda panda.

I

Erin Bailey: know, I know.

And honestly, I. I love that you can turn such a simple story into something so engaging.

Mm-hmm.

And so wonderful.

Yeah.

Um, so it was just a beautiful model and thank you, thank you so much for everything as always.

Um, you are just such a dear friend to riff and we appreciate and your support so much.

So thank you for your time tonight everyone, and um, feel free to reach out to either myself or Jill and we would be happy to answer any questions and be on the lookout for a recording.

Share it with all of your friends and colleagues.

Um, and toddlers to listen to that, read aloud because thank you to our friends at TCM.

We get to host that, uh, read aloud on our website as well, so come back and check that out.

So thanks.

Thank you so much, Jill.

It was so good to see you.

And happy holidays everyone.

Take care and see you at the next one.

Happy holidays everyone.

Bye-bye.