Happy World Read Aloud Day!

 As you gear up to read to your child and hopefully integrate this practice in your home on a regular basis, here are a few reminders to optimize the experience.

1. Choose a text you enjoy                                                                                                Obviously, you’ll need to keep your child’s age and interests in mind, but your enthusiasm will come through if you also choose texts that pique your interest or touch your heart.

2. Choose texts a few levels highter than listener’s reading level       A youngster’s listening level is higher than their reading level. This is one of the reasons that regular read alouds are so important. Via read alouds, you have the opportunity to share literature and other texts that your child would be unable to understand on his own. 

3. Vary the type of text                                                                                 Read alouds are a great way to expose kids to poetry, informational texts, wonderful picture books, along with classic and popular titles.  Feed your child varied texts and you will be surprised at the impact it will make on his confidence, vocabulary and general knowledge base. 4. 

4. Plan your stopping points                                                                            If you are reading a text that will take more than one sitting, plan ahead for where you will stop.  Stop at a place that will have your child begging for more.

5. Enbed opportunities to stop and think, or stop and talk             This is how you show kids that “reading is thinking”. Rather than rushing through and devouring a reading, stop to allow time to reflect, ask questions, clarify or discuss. Again, if you do this on a regular basis, your child will begin to do this on his own. Any reading teacher can tell you that lack of thinking and active reading is often at the root of a comprehension problem.     

6. Remember no one is TOO OLD for a read-aloud                                                           You can make read-aloud time equally as enjoyable as it was when your child was small. You just have to go about it in a different way. If your youngster is in fifth to eighth grade, you may have to be a bit more clever to entice them to listen, but it’s worth the effort. Start with short texts that hook them in, read aloud interesting news articles, hunt done funny poetry and let the fun begin. You’ll be so glad you did!Hopefully, you will celebrate by reading aloud to a loved one today. Hopefully, it will jumpstart a regular routine of reading aloud in your home. Truthfully, I believe this is one of the very best things parents can do to support their child’s literacy development.

Will you help?  Can you recommend a great read-aloud that we can all enjoy?

Here’s a few of my favorite read-alouds…