Challenging books are only the first part of challenging your precocious reader. The technical aspect of decoding words is only the beginning of appreciating great books and learning content. How do we get our kids to read more deeply? By asking the right questions.
Sometimes advanced readers can get the right questions asked by participating in gifted classes or pull out groups in which the teacher asks more complex questions. Its important to ascertain whether that is occurring in your child's classroom. Your child might also participate in a book club through a local public library, or possibly a church or bookseller. However, if you have a very young child, none of those may be accessible for your child at the moment.
So, I'm going to start a series on questions. You can either ask these orally with a younger child, or have an older child write/draw responses in a response journal. To start off with, I would go with a book that is at grade level or maybe just above grade level, because you want your child to focus on their response, not so much on decoding.
The question of the week was: what did you like best about this book?
Seems simple, but for us, it lead to a conversation about bullfighting, the history of bullfighting, Roman gladiators, and why we should be kind to animals.... So, you never can tell...
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