Reading Aloud to Children

My Favorite Read-Alouds
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Walk by a kindergarten, first or second grade classroom and you are likely to see the teacher reading to enrapt students. But something seems to happen after that. As children become better able to read independently, teachers stop reading to their classes. I think this is a mistake. Let me tell you the many reasons why.

Children need good role models for reading. Hearing a teacher, a librarian, a volunteer, or other adult read aloud allows a child to hear the phrasing, inflections, and expressions that a good reader uses. How can you learn this if all you hear is your classmates stumbling through an oral passage?
Reading aloud allows you to expose students to good literature. Picture books also expose the children to many styles of art.
Listening to a story develops listening skills. Good listening skills will benefit a student for a lifetime.
Listening to a novel develops a child's ability to imagine. In today's world of visual media, this is an underdeveloped skill in many children. You can do the same with younger children by occasionally reading the book without showing the pictures.
Children like to read and reread stories they have already heard. I read to my class every day. The books I read aloud were the most popular choices during our sustained silent reading period and often were the books checked out on library day. And I have lost count of how many times I have reread The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett since my fourth grade teacher read it to her class back in the 1950s.
Reading a book that is just a bit beyond the children's reading level gives children an insight into what is ahead. Hearing a good mystery, a science fiction or adventure story, or historical fiction opens up a new world of possibilities for children. For some children, this can be the motivation to work on their reading so they can read these books themselves.
Reading a chapter of a novel each day can lead to some good discussions, including working on skills such as prediction, character analysis, and the author's use of literary devices such as satire and flashback. One word of caution here: Don't overdo this. Sometimes just read a book for the pure enjoyment of it. Discuss it, of course. But you don't have to analyze every story to death. If you do, "death" of the joy of reading may be what you end up with.
Reading a book related to a content area can sometimes get your point across more effectively than reading the textbook. For instance, reading a story set in a particular historical period can have the children feeling what it was like to live through that time.

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Choosing a book to read

Once you have made the decision to read aloud to your students, you must decide what to read and how to work this into your regular curriculum. Here are some suggestions.

Pick a children's author or illustrator to concentrate on for a few days. Bring in as many of the author or illustrator's books as you can locate. Read all or some of them aloud to your class. Try to find biographical material about the author or illustrator.
- Richard C. Owen Publishers, Inc. has a wonderful series of author autobiographies.
- Scholastic has information on many authors at their website.
- The inside covers on the children's paperback order form booklets often have biographical information. Start a file.
- Teachers' magazines, such as Instructor and Book Links, frequently have author information as well as providing reviews of new books.
Choose a book that relates to what you are studying in science, social studies, math, or some other content area. There are lots of big books that can be used this way. You could read a nonfiction book that takes the subject beyond what is covered in the textbook. Or you could read a fictional story that relates to the content information.
- Many teachers' journals and magazines have reviews of children's books that will help you find books. Book Links, published by the American Library Association, is one of the best. If you can't afford your own subscription, talk to your librarian about getting a subscription for the school.
- If you find your school library lacking books that relate to a particular content area, talk to your librarian. The librarians I have worked with were always glad to get specific titles requested because it made their job of ordering books much easier.
You may want or need to provide students with some prior background knowledge by reading a nonfiction book before you read a related fictional story. For example, young children may better understand the story of Stellaluna, by Janell Cannon, if they have previously heard about real bats.
Make the books you read aloud, whether fiction or nonfiction, available for the children to reread during sustained silent reading or free time.
Read books from a variety of reading levels. This way all children will be able to find something they can reread on their own.
Many picture books have themes that can be effectively used with older students, even middle school and high school students. For example, Patricia Polacco's Pink and Say is about the friendship of two teenage soldiers, one black, one white, during the American Civil War. It is based on a true incident.
Take a children's literature class for recertification. If you have input into courses offered in your school system, bring this up as a possibility. New books are being published all the time; so even if you took a children's literature course as part of your undergraduate degree, you will learn something new.

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My Favorite Read-Alouds

These were some of the books that I used with my third grade students.

Picture books - anything by these authors, many of whom also illustrate their books:

Cynthia Rylant
Patricia McKissack
Steven Kellogg
James Marshall
Robert Munsch
Patricia Polacco
Kevin Henkes
William Steig
Jack Prelutsky
Jerry Pinkney (illustrator)
Leo Leoni
Marc Brown
Ezra Jack Keats
Jan Brett

I also had at least one of most authors' books in multiple copies so that we could read it as a class.

Novels - I tried to make other books by the author available for the children to read, especially if it was one of a series. I did not read all of these every year. I often gave a mini-synopsis of several books and let the class vote on the one they wanted to hear.

Otis Spofford by Beverly Cleary
Ramona the Pest by Beverly Cleary
Indian in the Cupboard by Lynne Reid Banks
Ida Early Comes Over the Mountain by Robert Burch
The Silver Crown by Robert O'Brien
Bunnicula by James Howe
Meet Felicity (Addy, Kirsten, etc...the American Girl series)
The Wishing Tree by Ruth Chew
The Cricket in Times Square by George Selden
Half Magic by Edward Eager

Nonfiction - The Early Science and the Ranger Rick Science series of Big Books carried by Newbridge Educational Publishing are wonderful resources. The photographs in both series are excellent.

Enjoy reading to your students! It's the one thing I really miss since retiring.

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