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Shannon Hardtke

The Importance of Read Alouds



Interactive read-alouds are critically important for young children in order
for them to develop as readers. For my READ 366 class we were given the
opportunity to facilitate our own read aloud in our Practicum classroom using a
book of our choice. By incorporating read-alouds into the curriculum, I am able to
provide students with opportunities to interact with written text that is
developmentally appropriate but written above students reading levels. This
contact with higher level written words allows students to develop their sense of
story structure, gain a sense of prosody, engage with new language and vocabulary,
work on comprehension and make connections with their prior knowledge. All
these elements combined provide young learners with crucial opportunities to
develop and improve their literacy.

For my read-aloud, I read the story The Apple Pie Tree by Zoe Hall. I
presented it to a group of four kindergarten students, engaging them throughout
with questions and then holding a light, open-ended discussion at the end. By doing
this interactive read-aloud, I was able to provide these students the opportunity to
expand their literacy knowledge and engage with text that they would enjoy.

By conducting this read-aloud, I gave the students an opportunity to develop
their sense of story structure. This facet of read-alouds is very important because it
is the idea that children understand that a story has a start, a middle and an end. A
sense of story structure also includes the idea that there will be a conflict within the
story that a main character will have to resolve. This ability to predict and
comprehend the flow of a story is extremely important for children as they interact
with texts. As they gain the ability to understand the key structures of a story they
are able to engage more deeply with the story, making literacy more meaningful.

While I read aloud to my kindergarteners, I was sure to emphasize
exclamations or questions, and pause appropriately. My ability to fluently read using
the appropriate rhythm is also known as prosody. Young readers often engage with
literacy in a very monotone, drone-like fashion due to their lack of knowledge
pertaining to prosody. By incorporating read-alouds in the classroom, students are
able to observe and then model the sounds of English that they hear from teachers.

In using the apple book with my students, I read the words autumn and
orchard. While some students may have known that autumn was interchangeable
with the season fall, others may be coming in contact with autumn for the first time.
Read-alouds provide teachers the opportunity to engage students with new
language, which then expands that childs vocabulary. This expansion of vocabulary
greatly benefits students, not only pertaining to literacy development, but in overall
development, as they are able to understand more language across the board which
gives them the ability to do and understand more.
Read-alouds also serve to connect students story and background
knowledge to the substance in the book. For my read aloud, many of the students
had baked apples pies before, creating a connection between the book and their life.
These types of connections between prior knowledge and literature engage children
in more meaningful ways. Read-alouds are also important for young children
because they may provide students with an introduction to a topic, such as apple
picking. Before my read-aloud students may not have known that apples come from
trees, but by engaging them with the book they are able to gain a new scheme that
they can take with them to create meaning in the future.

Finally, my read-aloud allowed the students to work on comprehension. I
lightly assessed this at the end of my reading by facilitating questions for the
students to discuss. Did the tree really grow an apple pie? My students all responded
no. They were able to comprehend that the tree merely grew the apple that then
went through a process before coming out as a pie. This comprehension skill is very
important for young childrens literacy development because it marks readers
ability to understand what is going on in the book. If my kindergarteners had
believed that the tree had actually created an apple pie, they would not have gained
the concepts that the book was trying to provide them with. This ability to
understand the point of the story is extremely important as students move forward
in their literacy development and come in contact with more complex literature.

Overall, I felt that my read-aloud was very successful and I believe the
students enjoyed engaging with me. While this was only my first, I can see why read-
alouds are so important to the literacy development of young readers. Their ability
to engage children with new vocabulary and material is extremely important in
order to allow for the scaffolding of learning to happen. With that, read-alouds give
readers the opportunity to make connections and deepen their comprehension of
topics. In the end read-alouds give young children the opportunity to interact with
the music and model of a story and in turn, fall in love with the written words.

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