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Hi there this is Betsy from Classroom Caboodle. Today I'll be talking about reading with voice.
So today I'm going to talk to you about teacher read-alouds and reading with great voice.
And you might think why the heck am I doing that?
Well, I can tell you why. I have a couple of stories.
We read aloud to students all the time in Elementary School, K through 6.
And y’know if I was in Middle or High School I would make sure that I was reading aloud
to students at those grade levels as well
because they need to hear what great fluency sounds like so that they can practice it.
We all know that the more fluent a student is when they read the better their comprehension.
So of course we’re gonna read aloud to students.
So, here’s why I’m doing this.
Y’know you probably read aloud to your students with great voice
but I had a student teacher once…
oh, man, I had to really work with him.
He was so boring to listen to, he just read a sentence,
read the next sentence and there really was no drama involved
and some of the books he was reading aloud from were really engaging, exciting books for kids
that they thought were really kind of boring.
So I really had to work hard.
Really the first rule of a great read-aloud
is to take that book and read it yourself, read it a couple of times,
to make sure you know where those exciting parts are.
Where you need to add drama.
Or where something might feel sad and you need to show that in your voice.
I also taught next door to this 5th grade teacher,
he had been teaching 20 some years, was nearing retirement.
He could not figure out for the life of him
why his students were so naughty during teacher read-alouds.
But to listen to that man read aloud.
Oh my Gosh those poor kids. It was monotone.
No inflection in his voice at all.
And they listened to this day-in and day-out.
So what I did was I went and did a read-aloud for him
with my over the top dramatic nature
and those kids were so invested and engaged in that book,
there was not one naughty student in the bunch.
And for him that was like “Oh! Okay!”
Y’know he kind of put some effort into it, he was a year away from retiring,
but things did get better in his classroom. But it does take practice.
I’m gonna show you an example of what I mean.
And you might think I’m being a little over the top
but after I do it I’ll explain a little bit more.
So, this is a favorite book by Derek Munson.
It’s called Enemy Pie.
If you haven’t read this one I suggest you pick it up.
It’s a great one for making friends.
It’s really kind of a character building, community building type book.
It’s a Reading Rainbow book too so if you get online I think
you can watch the video from Reading Rainbow of Enemy Pie as well.
Okay, so I’m going to read the first paragraph of this book without voice:
“It should have been a perfect summer
my dad helped me build a treehouse in our backyard,
my sister was at camp for three whole weeks
nd I was on the best baseball team in town.
It should have been a perfect summer, but it wasn’t.”
Here’s how I do it in my classroom, you ready?:
“It should have been a perfect summer
my dad helped me build a treehouse in our backyard,
my sister was at camp for three whole weeks
and I was on the best baseball team in town.
It should have been a perfect summer, but it wasn’t.”
Alright, that’s one paragraph, and I’ll tell you what, the students in my classroom
are dying for more at that point.
They want to know “why wasn’t it the best summer ever?
It sounded perfect, what’s gonna happen, what’s gonna happen?”
And you can bet those little predictions are running through their heads like crazy!
Did it seem over the top to you, maybe a little bit?
Well I’ll tell you what, you need to be over the top.
This is something that new teachers often are uncomfortable with,
is that whole dramatic over the top flair as a teacher.
But I can tell you what, teaching to me is about 90% dramatics.
In order to engage those students you really do have to be over the top
so that you’re this larger than life character
that students can’t tear their eyes away from and they want more of it.
So, it may feel uncomfortable to you to go that far over the top
to read with such dramatic flair but the pay-off is so worth it.
The more engaged students are in anything you do, the greater their comprehension.
So, I encourage you – go over the top!
Let me know what it feels like and how your students respond to it.
I even challenge you to read it like I did the first time,
read it monotone, even just a paragraph,
and then read it with dramatic flair and get your students' insights
on what the difference was and which one they prefer.
Kind of a little science experiment in your own classroom.
Let me know how it goes.