Read Aloud Helps

The podcast I listened to this week was Literacy in Content Areas: A Podcast with Penny Kittle. Penny Kittle is a classroom teacher and literacy coach in New Hampshire. I enjoyed listening to her speak because it was interesting hearing from someone who coaches teachers in content literacy. Teachers everywhere have issues trying to get there students to really dig deep into their work and find ways to include reading and writing. Penny Kittle helps teachers find the light through the tunnel and have their students learn new strategies on how to organize their thoughts when reading and studying texts. One way she does this is to have teachers come take a lesson in content literacy with her. She had some teachers look at a couple of tables, charts, and graphs. She told them to look at it as a text and say aloud what they are reading in the tables, charts, and graphs. She then asks them what they could write about it. She then makes a claim using one of the graphs and has the teachers write down evidence form the graphs that supports her claim. This strategy is very helpful with science and math teacher because it allows students to view tables, charts, and graphs in a different way that involved reading and writing. I really liked her view on English classes and how there is to much writing about a book that the whole class was assigned to read. She said students would be more interested if they got to research something that they found interesting. Students would dig deeper in their reading and writing if they had the opportunity to choose what they wanted to read and write about. This was a very helpful podcast that shows you a different way to look at content literacy and make it easier to incorporate into your classroom.

In class we have been learning about "read aloud." I think this a very helpful strategy that all teachers should use in the classroom. Not everyone understand how to read different types of books. One way to help your students is to read the text with them and point out different strategies that help you personally as a reader. This way students can use these strategies themselves and read with a better understanding of the material. For example, many text books have different images, tables, side notes, etc. that act as an aid for students as they read the book. It helps summarize chapters and also puts in visual aids. In my classroom at the beginning of the year or every time I had a new book for my students, I would do a read aloud with them. I think it would be helpful for the students to put the text book on the overhead and go through the book to show them how to read it and what helpful pictures and summaries the book has to make reading a little easier. Some teachers might find this as a waste of time, but I think if you tried it out with them you would realize how much they really don't know about their text books. I found a video on TeacherTube of this girl that does a poem read aloud. After every line in the poem she makes her own observations and side notes about what she just read. This helps her understand what is going on in the poem. This could be very helpful to do with students because a lot of times reading poems can be very difficult and you get nothing from it. Read aloud is a great strategy that all teachers should take the time to use with their students.