At StoryBox Hub, we work hard to make our videos engaging, entertaining, and a whole lot of fun for young people. We want kids to fall in love with stories, and to evoke the experience – and joy – of being read to. Our stories are designed to delight, and to create an immersive experience that ensures little readers stay focused on the story content. 

But we also know that caregivers and educators want their children’s screen time to be more than just fun. So we strive to make our content educational, too, following best-practise guidelines for engaging children via a digital medium. Our stories have multiple modes of viewing, and caregivers can choose the approach that best suits their children’s needs. 

We want to help bridge the gap between screen time, reading time and learning time, and our accessibility options, like our Read-Along series, transforms the act of listening to a story into one of active participation. By choosing the Read-Along option, emerging readers can follow the words on screen, the text synchronising and highlighting as the storyteller reads it aloud. For children learning to read, or those with reading challenges, text on screen offers a rich, fun, and engaging addition to an oral story, boosting literacy, language acquisition and learning.

Research indicates that one of the primary causes of reading difficulties in children is a struggle to decode written text. (Smythe, 2005). We know that learning to read is a complex task that requires both ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ processes – emerging readers need to be able to identify and decode printed words, while extracting meaning from contextual cues. (Cutting et al., 2009; Hook & Crawford-Brooke, 2015). Combining an oral storytelling experience with text-on-screen can help to counter this decoding requirement, enabling better comprehension and engagement. With a combination of carefully chosen visuals, sound effects, illustration scanning, lively storytelling and Read-Along text on screen, our stories offer rich and varied ways for young readers of all levels to engage with stories and to make meaning from texts.

Our Read-Along stories also help mirror the experience of shared reading and modelled reading, so crucial to developing reading skills. Research suggests that read-along text on screen can significantly benefit emerging readers by providing visual support for word recognition, enhancing comprehension, and allowing for self-paced learning, particularly when combined with highlighted text, audio narration, and interactive elements that support vocabulary development. 

At StoryBox, we want all kids to be able to access stories, regardless of where they are on their learning-to-read journey. Our Read-Along option allows emerging readers to develop both a love of stories and their reading, literacy and language skills. 

If you’re a StoryBox Hub trialer or subscriber, login now to explore our Read-Along options, and stay tuned for more in our Read-Along series to come.