You can extend the value of reading with creative enrichment activities using your children’s favorite books. Regardless of your child’s age, choose a couple of enrichment activities, projects, discussion guides and ideas shown below that make reading even more fun and meaningful. We’d love to know which of these activities were your favorites.

1. Encourage your child to use the illustrations in the book (without reading the words) to retell the story.
2. Ask how the story would be different if one major element was changed. For example, in The Three Pigs, how might the story change if the big bad wolf just wanted to be friends?
3. Stop at a crucial point in the story and ask your child to predict what is going to happen next.
4. Occasionally ask open-ended questions (with many possible answers) as you read such as, “Why do you think that…?”, “What else do you think that (name of character) might have done when…?”, or “What would you do if…?”
5. Play a thumbs up, thumbs down game where your child answers simple questions about the book (For example, “This book had a boy and a dog. This book took place in a city.”
6. Compare and contrast different elements of the book with your own life. For example, “This story happens in the country. We live in a city. The girl in this story has a cat. We also have a cat.”
7. Read the story using a different voice for each character.
8. Make up a new chapter for the story.
9. Draw a picture for a favorite part of the story.
10. Make up a tune to a familiar children’s song about the characters in the story.
11. Deepen your child’s understanding of the world by making text-to-self connections. For example, “This reminds me of a time when I found a nickel on the sidewalk…”
12. Expand your child’s understanding of the world by doing some age-appropriate research on a topic mentioned in the story. For example, learn about spiders after reading Diary of a Spider.“
13. Use elements from the story to create simple math word problems that your child can solve.
14. Read another book by the same author.
15. Read another book about a similar topic such as feeling jealous of a new sibling or a similar setting such as a farm.
16. Act out a scene from the story taking a role as one of the characters.
17. Use toys to recreate a favorite scene from the story.
18. Make a puppet from an old sock. Let the sock answer questions as the character.
19. Write a letter to one of the characters in the book offering advice.
20. Cook something mentioned in the story.