To keep your child/students grounded during the summer when school’s out, reading to your child 10 to 30 minutes daily will, in the long run, improve their comprehension and vocabulary. Beck and Mckeown (2001) note that read aloud is key to developing students’ comprehension skills especially when they can connect ideas within and beyond the text, use their background knowledge and guess at sophisticated words from the text.
Reading aloud also increases fluency as we model for students what fluent, meaningful reading is like (Rasinski & Padak, 2001) and we give our students a purely enjoyable experience. The main purpose is to model our enthusiasm of a good story and by using several criteria, you can develop in students a love of reading and books.
When reading to your students or children for example, you can do the following three things to model reading and motivate them:
1. Read your favorite stories. Some books I read go way back to my childhood but many are newer titles. I frequently use the multicultural titles from Kane-Miller and Usborne preschool titles - both of which can be found on my website. Click here to access it.
2. Reach beyond your students’ comfort zone. As Rasinski says, “think of books that students may not pick up on their own because they’re difficult or unfamiliar. By reading such books to students, you expose them to more sophisticated words, sentences, content, and ideas, which builds their vocabulary and comprehension skills. Be sure to include the very best books in various genres” (Rasinski, 2003). Again, I read historical fiction, biography, science fiction and fantasy, poetry, and folk tales again, using the books from Usborne which are already in my own home so I have easy access to them.
3. Make connections. As Rasinski says, “try to find books that connect to life in your classroom and to other texts students may be reading or experiencing (Hartman & Hartman, 1993).
Hopefully, you will notice a great difference in your child’s ability to simply pick up a book for pure enjoyment. So make those reading moments count. Work it!
Further Reading
Beck, I.L., & McKeown, M.G. (2001). Text talk: Capturing the benefits of read-aloud experiences for young children. The Reading Teacher, 55, 10-20.
Hartman, D.K., & Hartman, J.A. (1993). Reading across texts: Expanding the role of the reader. The Reading Teacher, 47, 202-211.
Rasinski, T.V., & Padak, N.D. (2001). From Phonics to Fluency: Effective Teaching of Decoding and Reading Fluency in the Elementary School. New York: Longman.