If you are a teacher and you own an iPad you will have heard of a great app called Puppet Pals, especially if you teach in Primary School. One fun way I used Puppet Pals was with my four boys, 2, 5, 6 and 9 respectively, to promote paired reading. The idea is pretty simple. Find a children’s book with enough characters for the whole family to be able to feature in the book. Then, take photos of the characters (your children presumably) and add them as characters in Puppet Pals. You can cut around their shape to make a nice set of puppets for the play (the boys loved doing it). Now you need to choose the backgrounds for the play and you are ready to go.
This activity promotes literacy skills and develops reading by making it enjoyable and creative. In fact, the whole family is involved in this epic production and this in itself is a really positive aspect of reading. Reading with your children for as little as 10 min a day could make a huge difference in their motivation and skills. This simple reading task encourages children to read with understanding and to interpret the content of the book creatively. In fact, they now need to really interact with the content of the book and as well as being given visual aids by the book itself, they will need to find their own to reproduce the story. As the children become the characters of the story themselves their emotional involvement with the story reaches new heights and this aids memory and oracy skills too. Watch the video below to see an example of this type of paired reading in action. Skip to the last 1.5 minutes, if you want to see the story told by my boys through Puppet Pals.
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