Planning Engaging Interactive Read-Alouds
It’s back to the new school year! One teaching practice that many student teachers teach right away and many teachers start the year off with is the interactive read-aloud. An interactive read-aloud is not just reading a book aloud to the students. Instead, it is a teaching practice that makes the reading work visible to students and allows students to think about the book that is being read. The teacher reads a book aloud to the students, but rather than reading it from the beginning to the end, the teacher stops and thinks aloud, modeling how she is thinking about the book. In addition to thinking about the book, the teacher will include interactions in the read-aloud, which allows the students to work on their own or with a partner to think through what is happening in the text.
Reading aloud to students is an important time of the school day in elementary school. When we are reading aloud to our students, we are doing things during this time that can’t be accomplished in a conversation. For example, we are giving students access to new books and authors and stories, we are building their background knowledge, we are teaching them to read for enjoyment, we are using words and language that we might now otherwise use, and we are modeling how we read. To have read-alouds be a successful practice, you need to plan. It takes planning in order to do this work well.
Choices of Books Matter
Read-alouds take planning. This means planning the books that you will read to your students. For example, at the beginning of the school year, I look for books about identity and community, so that I can learn about who my students are and what their interests are outside of school. I am also trying to build a community in the classroom so that the students will be able to work together over the course of the school year. It takes time to select books that are engaging and will allow the students to think about, connect with, and respond to the texts. I suggest being mindful of the books that you are selecting. You want to use the time efficiently, which means that you need strong books. There are so many resources now – Amazon Books sends out emails with the latest books for kids, so does Barnes and Noble. The American Library Association has wonderful book lists available that I like to check out (side note: here’s a podcast episode with the president of the American Library Association).
How Your Read Matters
My husband always tells me that I read to our daughters differently than he does. I want to keep my kids engaged while I am reading, so I change the tone and inflection of my voice while I am reading to my kids. I also did this when I was teaching. I want to keep students (and my daughters) excited about reading the book – so I make sure that my tone is engaging rather than flat. I try to add in an element of suspense to my voice when it is necessary as well. This work takes planning because you will need to read through the book and make decisions about how you plan to read certain parts. Another tip: make sure to read the punctuation. For example, when reading Mo Willems’ Pigeon books, he often uses bolded text and exclamation marks. I make sure to read those in a louder voice to reflect the emotion of Pigeon. This often gets laughs from the students, but…it keeps them wanting to keep listening. Reading with emotion also helps them make sense of what is happening in the story. This can be done when reading nonfiction as well. Often in nonfiction, there is a narrative part of the book, which you can absolutely read with expression.
Modeling How We Think About Reading
Showing kids how I am thinking about the book is one of my favorite parts of the interactive read-aloud. It is making my thinking about what I am reading visible. This is called a Think Aloud. I try to plan about three think alouds into the interactive read-alouds. It’s a fine balance – too many of these and the students will lose track of the story and what is happening, but not enough, and they may not understand the story. Whether you are reading a picture book or a chapter book or poetry, you want to model how you are thinking about the text. This is your time to also make connections and show how you are doing that while you are reading. I find think alouds very challenging when teaching with a scripted curriculum because then the connections are not authentic. Some things that you can highlight in your think alouds are: summarizing what has happened already, what you notice about the character, setting, or plot, tell when something similar happened in your own life or in another text that you have read with the class, show the students how you are using the context clues in the book to understand a difficult or unfamiliar word, and reread part of the text to help you understand what you have just read.
I do this often when I am reading with my daughters. I’ve mentioned in the podcast that I have been reading the Little House books with my daughter this summer. I often will pause and talk about why this way of life would be hard for me. I will also show her how I am thinking about some of the vocabulary words that are in the book that may be unfamiliar or new to her. It also teaches children that we all need to make sense of what we are reading and think carefully about the text.
Interactions
I love to hear what students are thinking while they are reading with me, and planning interactions is a great way to make this happen. Here are three different types of interactions that you can plan for and include in your interactive read-alouds:
Turn-and-Talk: This is when you ask a question and the students turn to face each other and answer the question together. If you do not feel the students are ready to answer the question with a partner, you can have them talk into their own hands to practice talking about their ideas. This works well for students who are new to interactive read-alouds. I use this interaction more than the others because it is quick and gets the kids thinking about the book and then talking about the book.
Stop-and-Jot: I ask students to stop-and-jot their ideas on a paper or post-it note when I want concrete data about what they were thinking about during the interactive read-aloud. How this works is that the teacher will ask a question and then have the students stop-and-jot their responses. This is a great informal assessment that I can collect for each student (which is harder to do for the turn-and-talks). As a modification, you can have the students write in the air and then turn-and-talk to share their thoughts with a partner.
Stop-and-Act: This interaction is great to get kids up and moving. I like to use this with younger kids when reading a book with many verbs. They can run or jump in place and interact with the text. An idea for older students – after reading the book, you can type up parts of the book on slips of paper. Then, you can hand them out to the students and put them in groups to share with each other. Then they can discuss what the book was about as well as other larger concepts about the book.
I hope this is helpful as you plan your interactive read-alouds this school year! Feel free to share what books you have used for interactive read-alouds.