A teacher in Vermont shared this idea with me. This is a read-aloud ritual that she uses the week before starting a new chapter book read-aloud with her students. Each day for 5 days she reads aloud the first chapter from 5 different books. At the end of the week the class votes on the …
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Reading Motivation
Read-Aloud Rituals: Birthday Bag and More
Birthday Bag Jim Trelease, author of The Read Aloud Handbook, says that read aloud is like doing a book commercial for kids and conditions them to associate reading with pleasure. Why is this important? Because human beings seek to have pleasurable experiences repeated. There is nothing more exciting to a child than their birthday, so let’s associate …
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Read-Aloud Rituals: Flashlight Friday
Technically, this isn’t a read-aloud ritual, but it definitely counts as a reading ritual. And it’s a favorite in my friend Jennie’s 5th and 6th grade classrooms. During independent reading time students silently read books of choice as they do every other day, except they read by the light of their flashlights!
Read Aloud Rituals: Poetry Pause
In his book Learning Under the Influence of Language and Literature Lester Laminack advocates six read-aloud opportunities that we can incorporate into our classroom routines: To build community at the beginning of each day. To put the sound of written language in the air. This reading time features books or other selections with lyrical language, …
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Read-Aloud Rituals: New Author Introduction
In a previous post I described my students’ favorite read-aloud ritual called “Choose a Book”. Every two weeks we spotlighted a new picture book author. Prior to reading the first book by a new author, I ceremoniously introduced the author by writing their name on a book and hanging it above the chalkboard. As the year progressed, …
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Read-Aloud Rituals: Choose-a-Book
Choose-a-Book was my favorite and longest running read-aloud rituals. Each morning my students were greeted with two picture books displayed on plate stands. As students arrived, they placed a unifix cube in front of the book they wanted to hear during our morning read aloud. During Morning Meeting I read aloud the book that received the most …
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Read-Aloud Rituals
In Mary Lee Hahn’s Reconsidering Read-Aloud she encourages teachers to “put read-aloud at the heart of reading instruction.” I couldn’t agree more! There are so many ways to do this, but I’d like to share one that is the best way I know to foster a community of readers–reading rituals. In her book Mary Lee …
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Stealing Reading Moments
I don’t think any of us would argue that children need lots of time to read in order to become proficient, lifelong readers. There is an overwhelming amount of research that points to a correlation between “eyes on text” and reading achievement. Here is one piece of data that can be found in Richard …
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