If you’re looking for a great way to build language and literacy skills, as well as observation and interpretation skills, try this. Find an animated short movie with no words. Play it through once, just watching. When your child says “Again, again” as all children do, play it again. This time, you narrate it – just describe what you’re seeing and what’s happening in the movie. Then, when they say “Again!” say “OK, but this time you have to tell me what it’s about, and what you see.”

You’ll notice that at times, your child uses the same words you did to describe the scene. Sometimes she will mix in her own descriptions and interpretations of things you commented on. Sometimes something completely different catches his eye, and he tells the story of some element you barely noticed the first time.

It’s a fascinating insight into what your child notices and what they ignore, and good practice for future reading, and for farther-in-the-future book reports or movie reviews.

I’ve linked to a Glen Keane video above, which is where we discovered this technique. There are also some fabulous Pixar shorts (think about For the Birds, with all the birds on a wire…. or Geri’s Game with the old man playing chess with himself, or the Blue Umbella or the opening sequence of Up where it traces the history of Ellie and Karl’s marriage). Or think of Fantasia and Fantasia 2000 from Disney. Or there’s tons of YouTube videos that your friends post on Facebook every day showing cute animals doing entertaining things. Show those to you child and ask him to explain what he sees.