Book reading can be a great time for autistic children to learn a variety of skills. In this month's Book Nook, we talk about how to engage your child during book reading to promote longer interactions and set the stage for language and literacy learning. 

Joint attention is a key skill that helps children develop interaction and language skills. For autistic children, research shows that better joint attention skills early on lead to better communication skills later in life. Learn more about joint attention and how you can encourage it during everyday interactions with your child.

How does one event in a book lead to another? What emotions or motivations lead characters to act in certain ways? Helping your child understand why things happen deepens their story comprehension and prepares them for reading and writing on their own. Here are some tips to get started.

Many studies have shown how It Takes Two to Talk builds children’s language skills. But did you know that the program also helps with children’s behaviour, social-emotional and social communication skills?  See what the most recent research reveals

When you bring a book to life with pretend play, you encourage your child to think more deeply about the story, its characters and what happens as the tale unfolds. Here are some tips to incorporate pretend play into book reading to enrich your child’s story understanding.

An important part of early literacy is understanding that letters correspond to particular sounds. This is called “sound awareness” and it’s linked to the development of a variety of other literacy and language skills. Here’s a fun Hanen strategy to help your child pay attention to the sounds in words.

Research shows that when children are curious, they not only learn more, but are more likely to remember what they learned. Here are some fun tips to encourage your child’s curiosity during everyday interactions to promote their early learning.

Growing your child’s vocabulary is key to helping her develop emergent literacy skills – the building blocks for learning to read and write. In this Book Nook, we look at some helpful strategies to introduce rare or unusual words to your child in a way that will help her both understand and remember them. 

Print knowledge is a key early literacy skill that helps set your child on the path to reading and writing success. Here's a fun Hanen strategy to help your child understand that print has meaning, that it represents spoken language and that it tells a story.