Let's Read Together

Everyone knows how important it is to read to young children — but it's the quality of shared reading that really affects emergent literacy. How well are adults engaging and teaching children as they read together? How well are children listening and responding?

The first and only tool to measure the quality of adult and child interactions during joint book reading, ACIRI helps parents promote the development of emergent literacy skills, helps early childhood educators improve and individualize their teaching of these skills, and helps family literacy programs provide evaluation data that demonstrates their practices are effective. Grounded in scientifically based reading research and extensively field tested, ACIRI

• Measures what's important. ACIRI assesses both adult and child behaviors in three categories that research has identified as critical: Enhancing Attention to Text, Promoting Interactive Reading and Supporting Comprehension, and Using Literacy Strategies.
• Takes just 15–20 minutes for users to observe the adult and child reading together, assess them jointly using 12 key reading behaviors, and score the assessment with the simple, easy-to-use form.
• Includes intervention activities. ACIRI is much more than an assessment. For each behavior evaluated, users will get tips on explaining the behavior to adults, plus two fun, photocopiable activities to help promote the behavior: a class activity and a take-home activity. Lists of recommended children's books to use with the activities are also included.

This manual and CD-ROM includes everything programs need to use ACIRI effectively—the complete photocopiable tool in English and Spanish, the intervention activities, detailed information on the behaviors assessed, technical data, and extended case stories on interactive reading programs. With this one-of-a-kind assessment and intervention tool, literacy programs will prove their effectiveness and adults will improve children's critical early experiences with books.