Webinar Transcript

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: Alright, well, we have lots of awesome content, don't want to waste any time, so we are gonna dive right in, and super excited! And welcome, everyone, we're so glad that you're here for our next Every Book Counts webinar. This specific one is Every Book is a Early Childhood Book. So, if you've joined us before, welcome back! 

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: And if you haven't, this is your first time, we're so excited to have you. So you can revisit this session, as well as any other past webinars on our site. We archive everything, and I'll be sure to… excuse me, I'll be sure to include the link in the chat for everything as we go on tonight. 

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: Tonight or today's session is focused on sharing, 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. 

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: Along with practical ways to boost engagement, encourage rich talk, and support early literacy development. We'll also get to discuss how to select a variety of books across genres, cultures, and topics. 

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: to strengthen these shared reading experiences and help all children see themselves in the stories that they hear. And especially excited tonight because we have a, read aloud, that we will be able to read a story and practice some of these strategies, tonight, so feel free to 

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: enjoy. If you have any kiddos around you that would love to hear or read a lot of the story, feel free to drag them in for that portion, but super excited for all of the content for tonight. 

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: And if you're new, We Are Reading is Fundamental, the nation's largest children's literacy nonprofit. 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 

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: With the practical tools and strategies they need to bring literacy to life. 

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: Tonight, we're thrilled to be joined by Dr. Pil… Jill Pentamonte, 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 Early Learning Foundations, or ELF, Lab. 

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: Her work focuses on language, literacy, and learning in the preschool and early elementary years. 

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: Dr. Pentamonte's research centers on supporting young children's language and literacy development, particularly for those at risk with reading… for reading difficulties. 

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: She has led multiple large-scale federally funded studies examining classroom practices, instructional supports, and interventions that strengthen early learning. 

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: Her work also advances the use of innovative tools and methods, 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 RIF's 

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: Early Childhood Education Advisory Board, so a lot of what, resources we'll share tonight, were guided under her expertise, so I get the opportunity to learn from her all of the time, so I'm excited to share that opportunity with you guys tonight. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to you, Dr. Pentamonte, and I'm going to stop sharing my screen so you can share yours. 

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Jill Pentimonti: Thank you! It's so great to be here with everyone tonight, and I just… I have to confess, shared book reading and talking about shared book reading is my absolute favorite thing. 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 for so many reasons, so… 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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, had so much great sort of work behind it and showed so much support for kids' skills. So… 

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Jill Pentimonti: Today, we'll really talk about the essential building blocks of early reading success. 

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Jill Pentimonti: All of those things that we can be doing early to set kids up on that right path to becoming really successful readers. 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. 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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 what, why, and how is what I'll go through for you all tonight. 

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Jill Pentimonti: Okay. So, just starting through into those essential skills, those early blocks, 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 sort of gather to be a skilled reader. 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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. 

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Jill Pentimonti: When you see the word cat, you know the C says k, the A says 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. 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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? 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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. 

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Jill Pentimonti: Right? When you… 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. 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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. 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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. 

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Jill Pentimonti: You've got to understand the background knowledge of what you're reading. If you're reading about some topic that you don't know anything about, and there are words you don't know, vocabulary you don't know, it's really hard to comprehend. 

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Jill Pentimonti: If you don't understand the structure of our language, what verbs mean, and adverbs, that's hard too. If you can't make connections or verbal reasoning 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 this simple thing. 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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 brains. 

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

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Jill Pentimonti: 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. 

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Jill Pentimonti: That's what you need for that word recognition piece. 

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Jill Pentimonti: So you've got to 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 idea and the sort of reality is that we know 

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Jill Pentimonti: How brains read, and that's fantastic. 

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

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Jill Pentimonti: When we… our brains actually change, we learn to read, which is 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? 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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. 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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. 

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Jill Pentimonti: And the cool thing is we see this in what I just talked about, in how we know we learn to read. Oral language, phonological awareness, understanding those sounds of language, and being able to blend. 

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Jill Pentimonti: and print knowledge, right? Understanding the sounds, the names of letters and the sounds they make. So, all really coming together. 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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. 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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 in 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. 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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. 

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Jill Pentimonti: Understanding narrative sweetenances, 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. 

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Jill Pentimonti: But when you're reading a story, and you talk about what happened before, during, and after this whole really cool story that a kid has just been read, you get that concept. It's a great way to build that piece of comprehension. 

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Jill Pentimonti: And here we go with 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 good 

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Jill Pentimonti: It's a great way to practice it, and a really fun way for kids. 

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Jill Pentimonti: And here's the print knowledge piece that I mentioned. It exposes children to letters, words. 

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Jill Pentimonti: other units of print. What better way to talk about letters than reading an alphabet book? There's so many cool ones out there. This one that has animals in it, right? And you're talking about letters, you're pointing at letters, you're having really deliberate conversations about the names and the sounds of letters. 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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. 

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

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Jill Pentimonti: Some really wonderful things you can start conversation about with kids when you're doing shared book reading. 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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. 

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Jill Pentimonti: These really big studies that bring together all the research that happened across decades, we call them meta-analysis. 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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, because 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. 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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. 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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. 

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Jill Pentimonti: So that brings me to sort of my last section of this, is sort of we've got the… what we want to really support kids' reading skills, we know how to do that, we know how the brain works. 

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

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Jill Pentimonti: 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. 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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 

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Jill Pentimonti: and children, so I'm going to start there with this component. And that's happening before, during, and after reading, right? That conversation. 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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. So I always like to think about it in this way. 

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Jill Pentimonti: Before the book, what you're going to want to do is draw children's attention the title. 

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Jill Pentimonti: Great way to point out print, talk about the letters in the title, talk about the sounds that they make, and then the comprehension piece, help get them excited about the book. 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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 listening comprehension, or language comprehension. 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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. 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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… 

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Jill Pentimonti: ability for them to think, I have contributions I want to make while we're reading this book. I'm going to talk about it, right? Getting that in their head. Is that the way we read books together? We talk about them. 

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Jill Pentimonti: And then after you compose prompts, ask questions to support any new vocabulary learned. Recall any of those facts. Build that listening and language comprehension. 

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Jill Pentimonti: draw connections to kids' lives, because when things make sense to them, and they're connected to their lives, they're definitely going to 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 aloud. 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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. 

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Jill Pentimonti: So, this first one, in building language, I said open-ended questions, and the reason we like open-ended questions so much is because open-ended questions are the ones 

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Jill Pentimonti: you can't answer in one word. It's not a yes or a no. You've really got to think, and you've really got to use language. And again, kids using more language, practicing that, is really what's going to build that muscle and build that skill, right? So a question is. 

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Jill Pentimonti: the turtle tucked his head in his 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? 

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Jill Pentimonti: And then, like I mentioned, building vocabulary, right? 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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 want to understand what's happening in the story. You better learn that new word, right? That building of vocabulary. 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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, I'll talk about that in a minute. 

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Jill Pentimonti: But, for example, in The Very Hungry Caterpillar, great way to talk about a cocoon. 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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 the more technical definition, and then brings it back to something kids will really understand. 

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Jill Pentimonti: Another really great resource that Reading as Fundamentals has, which I think is spectacular and 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. 

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Jill Pentimonti: Cards out for kids, because that visual connection is always going to be great for kids in vocabulary learning. 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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 in books. 

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Jill Pentimonti: It's 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. 

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Jill Pentimonti: So, a great way to do it is point out initial sounds. 

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Jill Pentimonti: We just talked about the word moon in this book. Say moon with me. Moon starts with the letter M that makes the m sound. Let's all say that together. And then later on in the day, try to point out other words that start with the m sound. 

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Jill Pentimonti: And another really great resource that Reading is Fundamental has is this chart of letters, and the sounds that they make, and pictures 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. 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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. 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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 a part of the word away, box without B sound is ox, now you try it. 

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Jill Pentimonti: Playing with those sounds while you're reading, because you've got everybody's attention, and you're thinking about some of those same words. 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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. 

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Jill Pentimonti: come help me read this text. What word am I going to read next? Can you point that out to me? So it really gets in their head, sort of the way print works in books. 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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, because the print is really big, the letters are really interesting, those alphabet books are perfect for this. 

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Jill Pentimonti: Come, and having kids come and point to letters in the books is always super helpful. 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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? 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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 want to teach? What's some good vocabulary words? And think about a quick definition. Or what are some… this has got some really cool letters in it, the text is very cool. I'm going to 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 

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Jill Pentimonti: the same sound, I can really focus on that. Think about that, and do a little planning. Does have to take a ton of time, but a little planning, right? 

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Jill Pentimonti: Choose those times that you're gonna do that, and obviously, you don't want to 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. 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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. 

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Jill Pentimonti: and re-read. 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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 want to focus on vocabulary, the next day you might want to point out print in the book, the next day you might want to talk about rhyming words. It doesn't all have to get done in the same shared work rating. 

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Jill Pentimonti: And then, sort of the next section, and this is, like, the think carefully about the books you are choosing. So let's talk about that. That's that second key component, right? Reading tips and types of books matter. So, why? 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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 a decades of research has shown this. 

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Jill Pentimonti: When you're reading an alphabet book, of course you're naturally going to 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. 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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 a sort of note, too, of something from research is kids are exposed to a lot of storybooks, and that's great. 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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 benefits of both of those here. 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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. 

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Jill Pentimonti: When they're later on, and they're doing, sort of, their own reading, they're real skilled readers, comprehension is that muscle they're going to have to use over and over again. So reading loud narrative books is perfect practice for it. 

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Jill Pentimonti: So ideas that you can from that research, we know that's really helpful. Point out the beginning, middle, and end. 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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. 

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Jill Pentimonti: encourage them to make predictions, and summarize what they just read. Again. 

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Jill Pentimonti: they're gonna be asked to do that later in their schooling career. If they get a practice doing that while they're doing some shared book reading with you, the adult, or the classroom teacher, spectacular, right? So, for example, a little activity you could do is make a story map, use the words, characters, and setting while you're doing that. 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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. 

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Jill Pentimonti: So then I'm going to move to information books. Again, those ones that really are fact-based. 

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Jill Pentimonti: exposure to them, a lot of really cool vocabulary. Lots of technical vocabulary that kids love to learn, especially if it's a topic they're super interested in, like dinosaurs, right? 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. 

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Jill Pentimonti: And then something I think is really important, I like to call text structure knowledge, which is that information books don't look like storybooks. 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. 

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Jill Pentimonti: And you know what else looks like that? Your textbooks, right? And so when you are that skilled reader, or third and fourth grade, and you get to a textbook. 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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 going to help with comprehension, too. 

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Jill Pentimonti: And of course, reading interest and engagement in topic is definitely a thing with these information books. We can definitely capture kids' interest when we read different books about different topics. 

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Jill Pentimonti: So, some ideas about, sort of, that research of what we know is really important about these informaction books. 

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Jill Pentimonti: You can provide content-related vocab instruction, you can activate, sort of, the knowledge they know about that. What do you know about dinosaurs? Right? What do you want to know? That's what scientists do, right? And, like, having those conversations about that content. 

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Jill Pentimonti: And then revisiting that content after you've read. 

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Jill Pentimonti: And then, obviously, choosing books that are really interesting to your class are definitely going to help you with this. 

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Jill Pentimonti: So, some ideas. Taking out those books and showing them the really cool text features. Why is there this table of contents here? Oh, I see on page 4, it talks about pterodactyls. Let's go to page 4, right? Show them what that looks like, why there's an index, why there are picture labels. 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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, because it's not a story with a before, during, and after, right? You can read just a couple of pages. 

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Jill Pentimonti: Have kids choose from the table of contents what pages you're going to 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 pieces of it, which I think is really nice about that. 

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Jill Pentimonti: Okay. 

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Jill Pentimonti: So, given that I've just talked about the importance of different types of books, 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 stop sharing in a minute and just show my screen, of what I think is a really good information book, especially for an early childhood classroom. And I wanted to share, too, that this read aloud is shared with permissions from teacher-created materials. 

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Jill Pentimonti: I want to say a huge thank you for giving us the rights to feature this book. 

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Jill Pentimonti: I really like these books because they've got real pictures, you can talk about real facts that are happening, and I'll show you some features in a minute. They make things easy for you, 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 add… 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. 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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 this panda's world. 

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Jill Pentimonti: So with that… 

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Jill Pentimonti: I'm going to 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 example, too, not only because it's an information book, and we can think through 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 

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Jill Pentimonti: of conversation out of it. So, I'll just show that as I'm doing this reallout. 

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Jill Pentimonti: Okay, so hopefully you can see. Alright, so the title of my book is A Den for Bebe. And what… look at this! I see two of the same letter. What letter is this? 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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? 

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Jill Pentimonti: Yeah, I bet it's a panda. What do you think he's eating? 

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Jill Pentimonti: Okay, should we find out a little bit more about Bebe the panda? 

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Jill Pentimonti: Alright. 

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Jill Pentimonti: Okay. 

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Jill Pentimonti: So this is his den where he lives, and look what's in here. It looks like Bebe has some trees. Here's the word trees, and here's some pictures of Bebe and trees. What is he doing? 

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Jill Pentimonti: Yeah, looks like he's climbing that tree. Have you ever climbed a tree? 

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Jill Pentimonti: Looks like so much fun. That's in his den. What a great thing to have in your den. 

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Jill Pentimonti: Oh, and here's the word hammock. 

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Jill Pentimonti: Here's the hammock. 

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Jill Pentimonti: a hammock, Is like a bed. 

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Jill Pentimonti: Baby sleeps on a hammock. What's cool about hammocks is they're usually outside, and they are hung from trees. Has anyone been in a hammock? 

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Jill Pentimonti: Does it sound like fun to sleep in a hammock? 

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Jill Pentimonti: I bet it would be really comfy, right? 

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Jill Pentimonti: So that's a new word, and that's that word, hammock. Let's all say hammock together. 

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Jill Pentimonti: Okay. 

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Jill Pentimonti: Oh, look, there's some rocks, and there's definitely rocks in Bebe's Bend. 

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Jill Pentimonti: Dan. Does he look like he's high up? He does. 

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Jill Pentimonti: How do you think he got there? 

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Jill Pentimonti: Climbing? Have you ever climbed up rocks? 

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Jill Pentimonti: Looks like a fun thing to do. 

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Jill Pentimonti: And here's grass, and he's got some grass. 

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Jill Pentimonti: If he's munching on that grass, do you think he's gonna eat that grass? 

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Jill Pentimonti: What types of things do you like to eat? He might have a snack. What's your favorite kind of snack? 

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Jill Pentimonti: They might have grass for a snack. 

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Jill Pentimonti: And here's a new word, too. That word says mural. 

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Jill Pentimonti: And here's Bebe. He's got a painting. A mural is like a very, very big painting. So that's not a real tree, that's a painting. Looks like Bebe has a very big mural. 

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

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Jill Pentimonti: Does it look like he's taking a nap? He's probably pretty tired. Taking a nap. 

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Jill Pentimonti: And here's snow. Oh my goodness, it must have snowed in BeiBei's den. 

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Jill Pentimonti: I love that word, snow. Say snow with me, snow. Starts with a S sound. Do you know any other words that start with? 

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Jill Pentimonti: And here's a ball. Looks like he's got a ball in here. 

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Jill Pentimonti: Wait a minute… there's the lowercase b. Where did we see an uppercase B? Where did we hear that B sound that the B makes? 

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Jill Pentimonti: That's right, it was on our title, because Bebe's name starts with a B. Can somebody come point to a B for me? 

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Jill Pentimonti: Can someone point to another B for me? Those are the uppercase Bs. 

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Jill Pentimonti: Alright, can someone come point to the lowercase b for me? 

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Jill Pentimonti: Goodness, lots of bees. Thank you. 

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Jill Pentimonti: And here's cameras. There's some cameras watching, Bebe. You know who those people are watching? It's scientists. 

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Jill Pentimonti: And scientists like 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. 

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Jill Pentimonti: Alright, so now I'm going to read some questions for you. How is Bebe's den like it would be in nature, in the real world? 

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Jill Pentimonti: Kinds of things. Do you want to turn to the page? 

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Jill Pentimonti: I bet you that he had had trees in his world. 

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Jill Pentimonti: And then, why are there toys in BeiBay Sand? Why do you think? 

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Jill Pentimonti: I bet he likes to play with toys. Do you guys like toys? What's your favorite? 

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Jill Pentimonti: Yeah, he had a ball. He, like, one too. 

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Jill Pentimonti: Okay. 

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Jill Pentimonti: So that, you can just see from even were a book with just a few words, right? 

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Jill Pentimonti: It had a ton of things to talk about, a ton to point out, and a ton to point out in regard to sort of those skills we know are most important during a shared book reading. 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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 books. 

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Jill Pentimonti: It's the best way to go. Make sure you've got both narrative and information books, and here's yet another 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 

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Jill Pentimonti: Balanced diet of reading. 

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Jill Pentimonti: And one more sort of resource, a whole website of really great things, and some of the things that I mentioned, during this webinar today that you can get on the website, and Reading is Fundamental. 

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Jill Pentimonti: 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. 

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: Oh my gosh, thank you, Jill. I'm copying and pasting your email, because I definitely want folks to have it in the chat. And I was just smiling ear to ear. This was so much fun, and it looks like, in the chat, toddler-approved webinar, so it looks like we had a toddler join us and love… 

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Jill Pentimonti: Fantastic. I mean, who doesn't love Bebe, bro? I mean, what a cute panda. 

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: I know, I know, and honestly, I… I love that you can turn such a simple story into something so engaging and so wonderful. Yeah. So it was just a beautiful model, and thank you, thank you so much for everything, as always. You are just such a dear friend to Riff, and we appreciate you and your support so much, so… 

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: Thank you for your time tonight, everyone, and… 

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: 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, and toddlers to listen to that read aloud, because thank you to our friends at TCM, we get to host that, read aloud on our website as well, so come back and check that out, so… 

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: 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! 

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Jill Pentimonti: Happy holidays, everyone!