Read-Alouds

I read recently that an elementary-level teacher should aim for six read-alouds per day. That is, the teacher should find six times during the school day when he or she can read out loud to the students. I think it was Mem Fox http://www.memfox.com/welcome.html who wrote this.

Although I'm not certain that six times per day is the perfect number, or whether it's a reachable goal in the midst of a typically busy elementary school day, I have no doubt that reading aloud to the early grades is tremendously beneficial. But when do you stop reading aloud to students? Surely you can't read aloud to cool, mature, sophisticated high school seniors. Yes, you can. And you should. Many of the reasons for reading to first-graders are still valid for reading to the upper grades.

Chief among these is probably to show your love of the written word. Model your enthusiasm for reading. It's likely to be infectious. Demonstrate to your students how powerful well-crafted prose or poetry can be. It follows from this that you should always read with passion and expression. Be prepared to read well; go over the passage you'll be reading a couple times beforehand. Choose selections that are especially well-written or that employ literary techniques you are teaching about in your class.

Another reason for reading aloud that applies equally well to all grades is, to paraphrase Fox, to get the sound of language into the air. Isn't that a great line? In any language arts classroom the sound of language should always be a fairly fresh echo. It wouldn't be a bad idea to start or end every single day with the recitation of a poem or an excerpt from a poem. Just as you should never limit vocabulary to its own unit (http://englishteacher59.blogspot.com/2008/03/willy-stratagem.html), you should similarly not restrict poetry to one small part of the curriculum. Confining poetry to its own little corner of the syllabus reinforces the idea that it is not relevant, not vital, not applicable to everyday life. This is an erroneous notion that we as English teachers must try hard to refute.

Whether it be poetry or prose, reading aloud to the students should be a regular part of a high school English teacher's day. For secondary classes six times is obviously unrealistic, so start with one. You may well be surprised by how attentive the students are, possibly even by how captivated they appear. Just don't ever let them hear you refer to the activity as a "read-along."