Book sharing is an interactive way for parents and children to explore books together. It involves parents following their child’s interest, and labelling and talking about book content that catches their child’s attention.
Book sharing supports the important interactions between babies, young children, and their parents, which are vital for early development. Research has shown that book sharing has lots of benefits for children’s language development, cognitive skills and relationships with their parents or caregivers.
Playtime with Books
The Playtime with Books programme introduces parents to new book sharing skills that they practice with their child. Parents access five online sessions about book sharing in their own time at home. They are also provided with a set of picture books and encouraged to share these with their child. These books have few or no words so the focus is on talking about and responding to book content, instead of simply reading. Programme facilitators check in with parents and provide individualised, positive feedback based on video clips that the parents send of them book sharing with their little ones.
We are developing Playtime with Books with academic partners, local services and families themselves, testing and improving the intervention as we go. Our goal is to create an intervention that works well for families and services, so that it can be scaled up to benefit as many children as possible in the future.
Watch this short animation to find out more about Playtime with Books:
Developing the programme
We use an approach called rapid-cycle design and testing to develop the Playtime with Books programme. This means that we test the programme in short cycles with families, ask them about their experience of receiving it, and then update the intervention based on their feedback. This approach has helped us to create a programme that families enjoy and that fits into their daily lives. We also listen to what local early years practitioners think and adapt the programme to fit into their workload and service context. Updating the intervention to reflect families’ and practitioners’ experiences and needs helps us make the programme more successful and scalable.
In the first stage of development, we partnered with Dartington Service Design Lab, who supported us in the rapid cycle design and test methodology. A report on this process can be found below and you can read more on their website.
Phase one of development
The first stage of the Playtime with Books programme testing and development was funded by the Nuffield Foundation. We worked in collaboration with the Early Intervention Foundation (EIF), Dartington Service Design Lab, the Centre for Evidence Based Early Intervention (CEBEI), Bangor University and Professors Lynne Murray and Peter Cooper. A report on the first stage of the research can be found below, and you can read more on the Nuffield Foundation’s website.
Phase two of development
Building on the Rapid Cycle Design and Testing, we collaborated with Nesta to understand more about how the programme could be scaled up for widespread delivery.
We further co-designed and tested the programme with families facing socioeconomic disadvantage in three local authorities, to assess its suitability and readiness for further impact evaluation and delivery at a wider scale. Based on our findings, we identified areas for further development including the development of a new digital platform for the programme, to meet the different needs of families receiving the programme and practitioners delivering it. Nesta and PEDAL have designed a new digital platform, which will be further developed by a digital agency and rigorously tested with families and practitioners in phase three. To read more about our learnings in phase two, please see our report below.
Phase three of development
Building on the learnings from phase two, we are now starting a new round of research and testing of Playtime with Books, funded by the Nuffield Foundation. Our aims for this round of development are to further understand the policy landscape, to identify the settings and workforce most suitable to deliver the intervention across the UK and to test and refine the new digital platform with parents and practitioners.
Videos for parents and caregivers, and early years practitioners
In 2024, we created two videos for our YouTube channel that explain what book sharing is, how to do it, how it benefits children and what it might look like.
This first video was created with early years practitioners in mind. We hope you find the advice in this video useful and are inspired to support and encourage the families that you work with to try book sharing with their little ones.
We also created a video for parents and caregivers which we’d love for you to share with the families that you work with: