Read Alouds Rock

Hardly a month goes by that I don’t run across research reiterating the highly significant benefits of read aloud in both the classroom and home.  In honor of Teacher Tuesday, this post concentrates on the classroom.  The following are prompts I use with my students to enhance their digestion of information.

Teachers can use the read aloud as a common text and model the reading strategies as well as explain literary techniques such as foreshadowing and flashback . . .

Think-Aloud Prompts I Say Aloud to Model My Thought Process During Reading ~

(these should not take longer than about a minute)

• Prepare students to listen to the selection by activating and building their prior knowledge.
• Predict what will happen next; offer support from the text.
• Make a connection to yourself, family, community or world issues.
• State that a passage confuses you, then show how you unconfuse yourself by rereading or using visual context clues such as photographs, illustrations, diagrams, charts, maps or graphs.
• Pinpoint an unfamiliar word and show how you use context clues.
• Stop and infer what you think a character’s personality is like and explain what in the text helped you determine this.
• Explain point of view and show students how you use your knowledge of pronouns to figure this out.
• Reread a short, tough passage to show how this strategy helps you understand.
• Point out a flashback and explain what you learn from it.
• Show how the main character changes from beginning to end and explain what made him/her change.
• Point out these narrative elements and spotlight one or two until students “get it.”
  • protagonist and problems faced
  • antagonistic forces and how each works against the protagonist
  • setting
  • conflicts
  • minor characters
  • climax
  • denouement or return to normalcy
  • point out these informal informational text features
  • sidebar
  • diagram
  • chart or map
  • quote
  • part of a letter
  • newspaper clip
  • photograph and caption

Questions/Prompts I Use to Engage Students While Reading Aloud

• What will this character do or decide?  How do you know?
• Is this character similar to anyone you know?  How?
• What information did you gather from this sidebar?
• State the problem the protagonist faces now.  Predict how he/she will solve it.
• Can you explain the antagonistic force at work here and how it works against the protagonist?
• Can you identify a theme?
• What is the point of view?  How do you know?
• Can you connect the title to the story?
• What new information did you learn?
• Did this information change your thinking?  If so, how?
• How would you solve that problem differently?
• Is there a community/world issue this part of the story addresses?

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