Book sharing is an interactive way for parents and children to explore books. It involves parents following their child’s interest, and labelling and talking about book content that catches their child’s attention.
Over five online sessions that parents access in their own time at home, Playtime with Books introduces parents to new book sharing skills that they practice with their child daily. We provide parents with and encourage them to use picture books with no or few words so that the focus is on talking about and responding to book content, instead of simply reading. Programme facilitators check in with parents and some of them provide parents with individualised, positive feedback based on video clips that the parents send of them book sharing with their little ones.
We are using an approach called Rapid Cycle Design and Testing. This means that we test the programme with a small number of families, ask them about their experience of receiving it, and then update the intervention based on their feedback. We hope that this approach will help us to create a programme that families enjoy doing and that fits into their daily lives. This approach can also help us to make the programme more scalable – this means creating something that we can successfully deliver to a large number of families.
The Playtime with Books study is funded by the Nuffield Foundation. We are working in collaboration with the Early Intervention Foundation (EIF), Dartington Service Lab, the Centre for Evidence Based Early Intervention (CEBEI), Bangor University and Professors Lynne Murray and Peter Cooper.
Playtime with Books blog
Read a blog written by Tilly and Aiman that tells you more about how to get started with booksharing.