Three Shifts to Power Up Your Read Alouds

Three Shifts: Mindset, Intention, and Extension

Ahhh… read aloud time. That favorite part of the day where our kids snuggle up to us to share great stories. A beloved tradition in elementary classrooms everywhere. But did you know:

• 77% of teachers read aloud to students, but only 30% read aloud daily. 27% of middle school teachers report never reading aloud. (Scholastic, 2017)

• 50-70% of Grade 1 teachers do not intentionally plan their read alouds (McCaffrey & Hisrich, 2017)

• When read alouds are not planned, teachers are more likely to pose surface-level questions, ask for content clarifications, and request simple summarizations (Haland et al., 2021)

To improve upon that, JOYcabulary encourages you to make 3 shifts to your read aloud time: mindset, intention and extension.

Mindset

A mindset shift is required by both teachers and students. Teachers need to realize that read aloud time is worth our valuable minutes. Picture books are lexical reservoirs. Reading one picture book per day provides young children with exposure to 78,000 words a year (Logan, Justice, Yumus, & Chapparro-Moreno, 2019)! The daily read aloud is non-negotiable. But in many classrooms, especially in primary classrooms, read aloud time is being pushed aside to make room for other work.

Students also need to shift their mindset. Unfortunately, as children grow older, they lose the natural curiosity about word meanings they had as toddlers. As readers, they often skip over words they do not know the meaning of - even if they were able to decode and pronounce it. We have to teach our students to be word conscious again - to notice and be curious about new words. Students can create systems for collecting new words and then using that system to help them use those words when speaking or writing.

Intention

Dr. Molly Ness cautions us that unless read alouds are intentionally planned, we will miss many instructional opportunities. Again, if we don’t plan our read alouds, we are more likely to pose surface-level questions and request simple summaries or retelling (Haland et al., 2021). Research shows teachable moment, on the fly, vocabulary supports are inequitably distributed from classroom to classroom. Teachers are least likely to explain words in schools where more than 50% of the children received free and reduced lunch (Wright and Neuman, 2013;2014).

Creating intentions helps us clarify what is most important and gives us a road map toward our destination. These intentions are motivational, but… an intention-action gap exists (Webb et al, 2006). So how do we move from mere intention to action? We must first define when we will read aloud. Put it into your daily schedule. Next, outline your goals for sharing this particular book. What instructional opportunities exist in its pages? Finally, make a plan. See our 7-step process for planning a read aloud.

Extensions

Vocabulary instruction needs to go beyond the “on the fly” explanation of a word in a teachable moment. In fact, you’ll find it very challenging to come up with a student-friendly definition on the spot! How do you explain the word absurd to a 7-year old without having time to think about it? Extensions are a way to extend learning to make it more challenging. Additionally, this type of instruction allows children to only receive one exposure to a new word and no opportunities at all to use or apply the new word to a different situation. Decontextualizing the word from its use in the text minimizes misconceptions and broadens meaning in other situations.

Students need multiple exposures to a word to truly ‘own’ it. Workbooks and worksheets are not the answer. Demanding the words to be written in a sentence can be hit or miss. This is why the vocabulary component in most core reading programs is not effective. Their resources rarely support teachers in doing more than introducing word meanings. See our posts on Extensions and Games.

These three simple shifts will power up student word acquisition with something you (hopefully) already do. Change the old-school drudgery of ‘look up the list’ into JOY.