Tag: Read Aloud

Poetry Month Day 4

I love love love (good) spoken word poetry! I love the energy; the slowing down and speeding up and the pauses that let an important word or sentence ring in your ears. It’s a performance that can be quite physical.

Check out Sarah Kay performing her piece “Hands”

(I tried to embed the video but something went wrong)

What do you think? Could you do something like this? She writes the pieces she performs but you can practice with poems from a book. It’s interesting to figure out which poems are good “performance” poems, and which are better for more of a “storytelling” read aloud.

Have fun! Talk some poetry today!
(I would LOVE to hear some audio of you reading/performing some cool poems.)

Tips for Reading Aloud: March edition

Image result for parents reading booksThere is something extra special about sharing a beloved book from our childhood with our own small people. There are a number of picture books from when I was little (early 80s) that are still in print today.

It is always a good idea to preview a book before beginning to read it aloud. In the case of a book we remember fondly from childhood, the preview isn’t so much about making sure the text works well as a read-aloud, but rather to screen it against the test of time. The fact is that some books, despite our fondest memories, do not age well. When read today, to today’s young audience, a number of “classics” are rather jarring in their treatment of diverse characters (read: they are sexist and racist.)

Image result for reading AND together OR kids OR parents

Sometimes we can change words on the fly, if we encounter a problematic term and it’s fairly isolated. Other times the prejudice becomes so thick, so quickly, that the best thing we can do is to stop reading and show our authentic dislike of the text; talk about why the prejudice is not okay as well as how you remember reading the book as a child (when it wasn’t something that stuck out as inappropriate) and isn’t it great that we can see a tangible example of how we are getting better as a society?

Keep sharing your favourite stories with the young people in your life.

Happy reading!

Tips for Reading Aloud: February Edition

*a few days late

Among other special days (like my birthday) February sees us celebrating both Family Day and Pink Shirt Day. Both of these days are inspiration for this month’s tip(s) for reading aloud.

Reading aloud together is a wonderful way for family members to bond with children. Try to make some time on your next visit with extended family for them to sit with the kids and read. Older siblings can also read to their younger brothers and sisters and, in doing so, strengthen their relationship in a unique way.
If a family member if willing to try reading aloud, they may not have a good book at hand. It can be helpful if you have a title to offer in case it’s needed.

Pink Shirt Day reminds us that it is better to face discrimination head-on. By standing up, speaking out and taking positive action we can often deflate hurtful situations. One way to start preparing young children for the inevitable day that they will be faced with injustice is by reading stories about significant issues and talking about them together. By experiencing troubling topics in the safety of a story read aloud while cuddling on the couch, children develop the emotional skills they will need when confronted with a troubling situation in real life.

Tips for Reading Aloud: January Edition

New year, new habits.

I have a friend with whom I used to work at Kidsbooks who had a family routine that I admire: after supper most nights she would read aloud from the dinning table while her partner and daughter washed the dishes. They did this well into her daughter’s teen years.

We often read a story aloud at bedtime. What other regular times might be conducive to reading aloud? Sunday mornings? While you wait for lessons to start? Or, if it’s challenging to find a regular time, try to choose reading aloud as a spontaneous family activity, like on a sunny afternoon, laying on the grass in the park.

Continuing to read aloud to our children as they get older has a number of benefits:

  • it supports their vocabulary development
  • it allows you to engage in tricky conversations about difficult topics
  • it maintains moments of closeness, physically and emotionally
  • it models an ongoing reading life

There is some more good information in this post on the blog “Best Book for Kids.”

Tips for reading aloud: December edition

Image result for longest night bauerI read The Longest Night by Marion Bauer to many of my classes this week in preparation for the winter solstice on Saturday. Each time, I turned off the lights over the story-time area of the library to simulate the dark and quiet of the longest night of the year.
The resulting atmosphere was very effective to invoke the rich wintery shadows of the illustrations as well as to highlight the sense of the animals calling out into the night.

Sometimes setting up the environment with a simple change can be an easy way to enrich our read aloud by infusing our listener’s atmospheric experience.

Tips for reading aloud: November edition

Happy November! The leaves have changed colours, the wind has a chill to it, my sweaters are moving to a more prominent spot in my closet…. It’s autumn!!!

This month’s tip for becoming better at reading aloud is voice modulation. That sounds technical and sophisticated but really all it means is varying the speed and volume of your voice. In Reading Magic, Mem Fox (children’s author, illustrator, and advocate for reading to children of all ages) suggests this as one very quick and easy thing to do that will make your read-aloud voice ten times better.

You don’t have to do all the funny voices for all the characters to be entertaining. When you read a story, let the words and sentences you’re reading come to life by:

      • putting more space in the middle and at the end of certain sentences. A pause right before or right after a key word or phrase can provide time for your listener to anticipate what’s about to happen or absorb what just occurred in the story.
      • s l o w i n g down an individual word for emphasis.
      • speeding up your reading during an exciting part of the story. Slow back down to regular reading speed before you reach the end of the sentence/section; the dynamic push and pull of reading speed will excite your listener.
      • let the pitch of your voice rise and fall or let your volume become a shout or a whisper as the text dictates. Literally do the thing the narration tells you. (“He floated up, up, up into the air….”) Don’t worry if you miss one. I always miss that first piece of dialogue that’s followed by the tag “…she whispered.” You’ll get it the next time around.

You don’t have to do all these things at once. Choose something that seems the easiest to try and play around with it. Unsurprisingly, the more you practice your dynamic read aloud voice the easier and better it will be.

If you only do one thing, do this!

I will regularly post about ways families can enrich students’ learning lives. One thing I will post about A BUNCH is reading aloud.

Reading aloud to children, even after they can read independently, is a hugely research-supported practice. I will try to post regular tips and supports here for families. Sometimes I will link to the supporting research or other opinion pieces, like this one from Happy You Happy Family which includes a good list of research findings as well as a list of “8 reasons why we don’t read aloud, and how to fix it.”