Children’s books aim to offer something interesting and educational, whether it is a story with a moral, a way to enter an imaginary world, or an introduction to cultural or historical variation in the way we live. But what if books could also be a way to teach something about language itself, in the course of telling a story?

Our goal is to take aspects of grammar – syntax and semantics – and use stories to help children improve their skills in understanding complex forms. There is a large amount of literature on what children find difficult in language, but less attention to how they could be helped. Teachers, parents and speech language pathologists can use the books to enrich children’s understanding of specific sentence structures* and their meanings. The books are designed to have multiple examples, but the examples are in the service of an interesting story, and do not read as a drill.

We recommend that adults use books in a dialogue, rather than just reading the text and showing the pictures. In dialogic reading, the adult asks questions as they read, enhancing the understanding by giving the child an active role in constructing meaning. Each book comes with sheets of questions appropriate for use across several readings, and as the book is re-read, the questions become more challenging and more specifically targeted to the structures in the book. Recognizing the importance of proof that this can be effective, we direct you to a recently published paper using our first book – “Thank you, Dr. Ophelia!” – that demonstrates significant gains in young children’s language and understanding when parents engage in the dialogic reading that we designed.

* The structures we are targeting include sentence complements, multiple adjectives, relative clauses, the passive voice, and quantifiers.