How do you keep your students engaged in a read-aloud?
The read-aloud looks a lot different in a secondary classroom. It’s not like the days when I was teaching six and seven-year-olds who ran to the carpet squealing with delight because it was read-aloud time. Many secondary students enjoy a read-aloud because it’s an excellent time to nap. So, how do you keep kids who have been up all night engaged in a quest to level up in a video game from sleeping during a read-aloud?
First, be a good reader. A skilled reader can model proper reading fluency and expression. Hearing the text read with intonation and expression can make it easier for students to understand the meaning and nuances of the content. The “Let’s eat, Grandma”/”Let’s eat grandma” example comes to mind here.
As a former elementary school teacher and children’s librarian, I am practiced in the art of reading aloud. I love reading aloud, but after reading the same story for the third time, I started to lose enthusiasm for it. If reading aloud isn’t your thing, try signing up for Audible. Audible is an audiobook store connected to Amazon. I use it all of the time, and it’s fantastic. You can log in and play the audiobook for your class without worrying about stumbling over words or losing your voice from reading out loud for five class periods in a row. However, if you put on an audiobook and start filing papers, grading notebooks, checking your emails, etc., your students will see that as a signal that this text isn’t important and may not pay attention to it.
Choose a good book. Students need to hear fluent reading from current texts. Through a shared text, they can have meaningful conversations about themes, perspectives, and real-world conflicts they connect to. If you choose a relevant text that your students can identify with in some way, they will have rich discussions about the connections that they are making.
How do you choose such a text? First of all, know your students. What are they interested in? What life experiences do they bring to the discussion? Solicit their input on what texts you will read. And read lots of books and blogs about books. Join groups on social media sites, follow book-related hashtags, and ask other teachers for their recommendations.
Some good places to start:
- The Nerdy Book Club
- American Library Association
- We Need Diverse Books
- School Library Journal
- Goodreads
- The Global Read Aloud
- NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English)
Give your students something to look at. While reading Peter Brown’s “The Wild Robot,” I used the Snapchat App to make notes about my thinking while reading the book. Tara Martin calls these visual text annotations BookSnaps.
I was collecting notes about what I wanted to highlight from this text when I read it to the class. A concern I have when doing a read-aloud is that some of my students need to be more engaged in order to comprehend the text because just listening without anything to look at isn’t enough for them. So, I added my book snaps to Google Slides and created a slide show to accompany the reading. The booksnap images worked great for creating visual reading guides (pictured below).
This visual reading guide not only helped my students but it helped me, too. I teach multiple sections of ELA, meaning I read the same chapters numerous times daily. I sometimes forget to stop and talk about something in the text when doing repeated readings because I’ve done it already. These reading guides helped to keep me from skipping over things I wanted to stop and talk about.
When students miss class, they borrow an extra copy of the book to catch up on the reading they missed, but there wasn’t a way for these students to catch up on the discussion of the text they missed. The reading guides helped with that problem, too.
I played the audiobook of the text so that I could be focused on when to change the slides in the slide show and pause the reading. The reading guide noticeably improved comprehension and engagement over the previous read-aloud that we had done without a visual guide.
Give your students something to do. This simple notion can lead to some great results. Some students made comic strip-style recreations of multiple events from the text, while others created an image of a single key moment in that week’s reading. All I did was give them a sheet of blank paper on Monday. They kept the same page for the week and either added more or continued working on the same image daily until I collected their pages on Friday. This doodling task also helped eliminate my doubts about whether or not they were paying attention–sometimes, with a read-aloud, it is hard to tell. Looking at their sketches, I could see they understood the critical moments. Students enjoyed seeing other drawings when I displayed them on the bulletin board. This last part is essential. I noticed that the sketches improved each week because they saw how someone else sketched the text and incorporated those techniques into their drawings the following week.
To capitalize on this interest in viewing each other’s work, I created a gallery walk reflection page for students to fill out. This reflection page helped to move the discussion from compliments and questions to academic conversations involving the text. Click on the image below to download my gallery walk reflection page.
