Reading to your kids is so very important. Even with high stakes tests hanging over my shoulders, as a classroom teacher I invest the time to read aloud to my students every single day because I believe that it is the best way to promote a love for books*. But reading aloud offers so much more!It’s a perfect time to:
- discuss unfamiliar words ~vocabulary
- share/compare what you’re imagining in your minds ~comprehension
- demonstrate reading with a pace that matches what the author’s saying (sometimes we speed up, sometimes we slow down) ~fluency/prosody
- demonstrate interpretations of the voices of characters (anger, southern twang, squeaky, etc.) ~fluency/prosody
- compare the events of this story to other stories you know or to your own lives ~comprehension
- introduce a variety of genres to expand your children’s experiences with books and how they work ~comprehension
- promote the character traits you’d like to see in yourself and others ~comprehension
In the classroom, I continually say things like, “Whoa. You are acting determined just like little Willy in Stone Fox, “ or “You can write in your journal the way Sam Beaver wrote in his in The Trumpet of the Swan.”Remember, your kids are capable of comprehending books far beyond their reading levels. When you’re reading to them, they are able to do the deep work of comprehension without having to slow down to decode unfamiliar words.One more thing . . . Once I read a book to students, they are often excited to read it themselves. That’s WONDERFUL! They know what’s going happen, so they’re better equipped to tackle what might otherwise be challenging words for them. If it’s a quality book, reading it twice will be a great investmentSo, have I convinced you?
