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Help
Your Child Read
 Instructor (1990)
Oct, 2000
Let the
Words Work Their Magic.
Author: Lucy Calkins
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 thunder
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.
Reading Aloud
Within Reading and Writing Minilessons
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.
I have since come to believe that working together
around the whole-class read-aloud text is a much better way to
achieve the goals I was aiming toward back then. Instead of
assigning the class to read a chapter or two each night and then
discussing it every day at school, we now read the hook aloud and
weave discussions into read-aloud times. Our discussion often occurs
at selected moments during the read-aloud, in the midst of the rich,
vivid drama-in-the-mind that happens as children listen to a
text.
As effective as it can be to say what we are thinking
or invite children to talk in the midst of listening to a text, we
do need, however, to avoid pausing to discuss a text so often that
we overwhelm the story. The single most important habit we need to
model is engagement in the text.
Reading Aloud Can Help
Children Talk and Think About Texts
Oddly enough, many
students will listen to a text and have nothing to say. But when
these same students talk about television shows or movies, they
don't need conversational starters or webs. Something is drastically
wrong, then, when our students are silenced by texts. I suspect this
is often the result of problematic instruction. For too long,
children have read literature and then faced a barrage of questions,
each with one right answer. Recently I heard a teacher hold up
Arnold Label's book, Frog and Toad, and say to a group of children,
"Frog and Toad are friends who are what, class?" I know the book
well but I didn't have a clue about what the teacher expected the
class to say. One boy piped in, "Friendly? Frog and Toad are friends
who are friendly?" The child's intonation alone showed that he was
asking, "Is this the answer you want?"
But no, the teacher
was looking for another word to fill in the blank in her sentence.
She repeated her question. "Frog and Toad is about friends who are
what, class?"
"Adventurous?" a child suggested, and although
I cheered his ingenuity and knowledge of the story, the teacher
continued to scan the room looking for raised hands and the right
answer. Now she produced a clue. "It starts with a d."
I
wracked my mind. "Frog and Toad are, what?" I thought,
"Damp?"
No one ventured another guess, so the teacher
completed her own sentence. "Are Frog and Toad different, class?"
she asked, and proceeded to deliver her predetermined lesson on
multiculturalism. Frog is green and Toad is brown, but they are,
after all, still friends.
To help our children think, talk,
and eventually write well about texts, we must make a dramatic break
from the habit of grilling them with known-answer questions.
Couldn't we simply say to our children, "Could we talk about the
reactions the children in this book had to Crow Boy?" and then back
out of the conversation, leaving space for them to comment and
elaborate on each other's comments without acting as masters of
ceremonies? In helping classrooms of children learn to converse
together, the easiest step is to use "say somethings," a strategy we
learned from Kathy Short, Carolyn Burke, and Jerry Harste's book,
Creating Classrooms for Authors and Inquirers (1996). We tend to
read aloud and to pause at "talk-worthy" spots.
At first, we
simply encourage children to talk to anyone who is sitting nearby.
After a few weeks, we assign children to sit beside the same
read-aloud partner each day. Long-term read-aloud partners allow
children to say things like, "You know how yesterday you said such
and such? Well, it's happening still," or, "It's the same as
before!" Children practice getting in and out of talk positions
quickly, so that before long, we can pause at a key section of the
text and look out at our children, who note our signal and get
knee-to-knee with their partners. The room erupts in conversation.
After a few minutes, we simply resume reading (beginning with a
paragraph of overlap as the voices subside).
How important is
reading aloud? Critically important. Too often children (and some
adults) consider the read-aloud as a time to doze, dream, fiddle,
and snack. I see the read-aloud as the heart of our reading
instruction time, and I want kids' full attention to be on what we
do together.
This article was excerpted from Lucy Calkins'
new bock, The Art of Teaching Reading (Addison Wesley Longman,
2000). Lucy Calkins is a founding director of the Teacher's College
Writing Project. |
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