Reading aloud is the single most important factor to help children become proficient, avid readers. Here's how to tap its power
How important it is to teach children to lose themselves in the dream of the story. We want our children to gulp down stories--to under across the finish line at the Kentucky Derby or live alone in a thatched hut and work at the mill.
Our strongest readers open a book and find themselves, in novelist John Gardner's words, on "a train moving through Russia" or listening in panic for some sound behind the fictional door. But when other children read they are not on that train, they are not listening behind fictional doors. They are thinking instead about short vowels and "Whew, what a long paragraph" and "How many more pages are there?" and "What's Pedro doing by the window?" How do we help all children become passionately engaged in the world of the story? How do we help them know what it is to lose them-selves in the drama of a story? Reading aloud to children is part of the answer.
Reading Aloud to Children Matters
Reading aloud is so important, I have often proposed to Teacher's College that we never place a student teacher in the classroom of a teacher who doesn't read aloud each day. After evaluating ten thousand research studies, the U.S. Department of Education's Commission on Reading issued a report, Becoming a Nation of Readers (1985), which goes so far as to state that "The single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children." The study found "conclusive evidence" supporting reading aloud in the home and in the classroom, and it claimed that adults need to read aloud to children not just when children can't yet read on their own, but throughout all the grades.
We read aloud many times and for many purposes. If we are predictable about this, our students can anticipate not only that we'll read aloud but also the roles we hope they will take on during each of these read-aloud times.
Reading Aloud to Start the Day
Ralph Peterson, author of Life in a Crowded Place (1992), suggests that we respond to the challenges of our elbow-to-elbow classroom living by using ceremony, ritual, and celebration to create learning communities. One important part of building a classroom community is finding ways to cross the threshold, ways to mark the classroom as a world apart. In many classrooms, the morning read-aloud convenes the community and acts as a blessing on the day.
For our opening read-aloud we select poems and picturebooks that make us all laugh and fall in love with words. Above all, we read favorites. Of course we read texts our students have written and texts we have written, and we reread often. Our goal, as the poet Julius Lester says, is for the literature to "link our souls like pearls on a string, bringing us together in a shared and luminous humanity." This read-aloud time tends to last only five minutes or so. We don't stop to clap out the syllables in compound words, preteach vocabulary, or elicit children's predictions. We simply get out of the way of the text and let the words work their magic.
In the minilesson before our writing workshop, we often return to texts we've introduced during the morning read-aloud (or during a later read-aloud of a chapter). This time we study passages we love, talk about what the author did, and consider the effect the author was hoping to create.
In the minilesson that precedes our reading workshop, we may also return to the text we introduced during a previous read-aloud. When we revisit books, we show readers the richness that is there in literature for those who have the eyes to see. "This morning, I want to talk about the scientific language some authors weave into their texts," we might say. "Listen again while I read a couple of sections from 'I'm in Charge of Celebrations' and pay attention to what you do when you hear (or read) words you don't know."
Reading Aloud in Support of the Social Studies and Science Curriculum
It's terribly important for children to listen to nonfiction texts read aloud. If our children are going to comprehend and write news articles, essays, how-to texts, directions, arguments, and proclamations, they need to develop an ear for the rhythms and structures used in these genres. We cannot take all our children on field trips to see fish ladders bypassing the giant dams of the Snake River or to stand under the massive ruins of Rome. But we can give our children the words that will take them to new worlds, launch new investigations, and introduce new concepts. Oftentimes our upper-elementary children will have difficulties on standardized reading tests not because they can't read the words or recall a passage but because they don't know the difference between a continent and a country a century and a decade, a species and a gender. It would be wise to support our students as they grow to be stronger listeners to nonfiction texts. We do this by:
* Reading aloud nonfiction books that support our students' interests and hobbies as well as our curriculum.
* Reading aloud very simple, accessible books to introduce a subject, only later moving to more complex texts on that subject.
* Giving children more information early on so they are in a better position to learn more: it helps to watch the movie or make the field trip or hear the overview of a subject before reading a nonfiction text on that topic.
* Actively modeling our own learning process by pulling back from a text and saying, "Walt a minute! So far, he's said birds migrate in four ways [we list them]. Now it looks as if he's on a new topic of how he can research bird migration, or at least I think he is .... Yes, look, I was right. He says here ..."
Reading Aloud in Support of Whole-Class Book Studies: Teaching the Qualities of Good Reading
We also read aloud to demonstrate to our children and to mentor them in the habits, values, and strategies of proficient readers, and to help them experience the bounties of thoughtful, reflective reading. When I taught fifth and sixth grade, my students and I sometimes read a chapter book together. I'd assign a chapter or two each evening, and in school we'd "walk through the text together," defining and finding examples of literary techniques and noticing symbolic meanings. Only now, in retrospect, do I realize it was educational malpractice to require that my struggling readers fake their way through a book they could not read. But there were other problems as well; the time lapse between when children read the text at home and when all of us responded to it in class meant that I could only deal with the remnants of their reading.
Just thougnt I woud add some BS to this thread, I hope you didnt read it all..
Threads like this and just like this post are worthless........
:angry :angry :angry Just making a point
