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.