reading aloud at school every day.
Your enthusiasm for reading is contagious. In addition to reading aloud to your students every day, take advantage of every opportunity to talk to your students about what you are reading and your favorites (or those of your friends and family). It works!
From The Read-Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelease
“The love of reading is more caught than taught and best caught in groups.”
Read on…
One day I found myself doing some volunteer work in a classroom of sixth-graders in Springfield, Massachusetts. After spending an hour with the class (discussing my career as an artist and writer), I noticed a little novel on the shelf near the door. It was The Bears’ House by Marilyn Sachs, and it caught my eye because I’d just finished reading it to my daughter.
“Who’s reading The Bears’ House?” I asked the class. Several girls’ hands went up. What followed was an unrehearsed lovefest about reading, talking with them about The Bears’ House and other books I’d read to my children and sharing secrets I knew about the authors: “Did you know that when Robert McCloskey was illustrating Make Way for Ducklings, he had a dreadful time drawing those ducks? He finally brought six ducklings up to his apartment to get a closer look. In the end, because they kept moving around so much, do you know what he did? You may find this hard to believe, but I promise you it’s true: in order to get them to hold still, he slowed them down by getting them drunk on wine!”
It was forty-five minutes before I could say good-bye. The teacher subsequently wrote to say that the children had begged and begged to go the library to get the books that I’d talked about. At the time, I wondered what it was that I had said that was so unusual. All I’d done was talk about my family’s favorite books. I’d been giving them book reports (just as Oprah would do twenty-five years later). As soon as I called it that, I realized what made it so special. It probably was the first time any of them had ever heard and adult give a book report – an unsolicited one, at that. I’d piqued the children’s interest simply by giving them a book “commercial.” From then on, whenever I visited a classroom, I’d save some time at the end to talk about reading. I’d begin by asking, “What have you read lately? Anybody read any good books lately?”
To my dismay, I discovered they weren’t reading much at all. But I slowly began to notice one difference. There were isolated classrooms in which the kids were reading – reading a ton! How is it, I puzzled, that these kids are so turned on to reading while the class across the hall (where I had been the previous month) wasn’t reading anything? Same principal, same neighborhood, same textbooks. What’s up? When I pursued it further I discovered that the difference was standing in the front of the room: the teacher. In nearly every one of the turned-on classes, the teacher read to the class on a regular basis.
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