My children and I are constantly reading like many other families or just avid individual readers. Because we homeschool, reading books is one way that we can achieve a lot of literacy goals and the task of reading out loud (along with having children hand write as discussed in a previous blog) is more beneficial than many think.
Here are the various read out loud activities every day in our home:
1. we read the Bible aloud together at the breakfast table. My children are new to the Bible, but the best way to model how to do anything is to simply do it with your children. We started this at Christmas with Luke and realized that Luke was a pretty difficult book to begin with young children, so we switched to Psalms which proved to be a fast favorite for the kids. It's poetic/musical sound and the praise and gratitude were just perfect starts to the day. We also started reading John to get them into the New Testament. The kids are learning how to use a Table of Contents, how to locate verse numbers, and, of course, reading out loud. They enjoy finding a favorite scripture to highlight and share with the table. Then we talk about what it means. I use a Charles Stanley bible that will provide an explanation for verses here and there.
2. I read a chapter book with each child individually as part of their daily homeschool lesson. I let them choose this book, and at any point that they are not enjoying the book, they are allowed to quit the book. This is really important because they have the feeling of agency, and they are more willing and excited to learn since they choose the book to begin with.
Here is where reading aloud has been a game changer for their own reading levels and comprehension. Before they are really able to read, they sit beside me and we read. Sometimes we read on the couch, sometimes on my bed, but my personal favorite is outside on the porch when the weather is enjoyable.
Before they are able to read a chapter book, I read aloud, and the child hears the rhythm of a sentence, the inflection, pronunciation, and they hear varying sentence types and various unique sentence structures that make reading engaging. Of course, they also learn new words. Google says kids learn between 4,000-12,000 words a year just by reading.
For my older kids, we alternate pages. The older they get, the more they enjoy reading. I think because it's easier for them to pay attention. My son is reading Hardy Boys and very much enjoying trying to figure out how those nifty boys will get themselves out of any good mystery. My daughter is reading the Bayern series. They learn new vocabulary words on almost every page that they read. They learn unique sentence structures, and they practice pronunciation and enunciation in every single sentence. These are important skills not only to their literacy but also to their speaking abilities -- public speaking, teaching, and interviewing -- all very important instances of speaking. One of the most significant lessons that they're learning is how to read words that are broken at the end of a line with a hyphen. The only way that children will learn this skill is first by exposure to it, seeing it in a book or other text. The only way they master this is by practicing, AKA reading.
3. Finally, every night we read together. Because my children are younger, my main goal is that they just generally enjoy reading, and we build a strong foundation on reading as a necessity of every day. We've read a number of wonderful series at night that I also really enjoy. We've read the Percy Jackson series, and we are currently reading the Harry Potter series. We have a number of series on deck in our library, including another series by Rick Riordan since we so enjoyed Percy Jackson! At first, I just read aloud, and we enjoyed talking about character development, conflict, and experienced learning empathy while reading (which I talked about in a previous blog also). I want my oldest to begin practicing annotating a text, so I have her follow along in her own copy. Sometimes she asks if she can read a page here and there, but mostly, she enjoys highlighting sentences and most especially telling me -- "mom, you highlighted that sentence." Here we have talked about foreshadow and mostly just lines we like and why.
We had a really fun situation arise due to reading out loud just the other night. Ron was fed up with Hermione's elf rights harangue, and, in the book, he says, "er-my-knee!" but I read it like an exasperated "Heeeerrrr-myyyy-neeeee!" (her name). Adelynn said, "mom, I think he was just kicked in the knee?" So we looked back at the paragraph, talked through it, and considered both options. We talked about how authors construct dialogue and accents by writing words phonetically sometimes to convey how the character said it rather than how it would actually be spelled or written. By the end of it, the kids were all grinning at how very clever this was in writing. And we would have never had this conversation had we not been reading out loud together.
Those are our practices for reading at this phase of life. I want to share just one more thing. My experiences above all are very specific to my kids being small. I think many times people think that their kids are too big for that. Long ago though, reading aloud in groups was the norm. Families would gather in rooms and listen to someone read a book aloud. Reading used to very much be a community activity, and I think it's important that we still try to keep that alive in our homes. It's so convenient these days to use an audiobook or podcast -- anything. One of my very favorite memories as a teenager was one Christmas my dad decided that we would read together a Frank Peretti book. It was a little scary, definitely for older readers, but goodness was I on the edge of the couch. My dad sat on the fireplace's edge and read, then we would take a break. I think we actually only read one or two chapters. We never even finished it, but it was and is a precious memory for me. I was moody teenager at the time, but I really appreciated us doing something simple together in the family room. I can't even imagine what it will be like when I have teenagers, but I'm hoping by then there's an entire movement #readwithyourteenagers.
It's not only good to read aloud for their development in reading fluency and accuracy, but it's emotionally good. It's good because they learn empathy and character development (which they'll definitely need! They need to know that one wrong decision can always be redeemed in a good character arc!). It's also just good to read as a community.
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