Today is National Read Aloud Day. And we should read out loud. Too many teachers use the following book (at least in practice), “One Hundred Ways to Teach Silent Reading” by Nila Banton Smith, 1925. Nope. Let us look at more:
Here is an older book to help us, “The Rational Method in Reading”, by Edward G. Ward, 1896. The author tells us about “an Original presentation of sight and sound work that leads rapidly to independant and intelligent reading.” This Manual of Instruction for teachers, is to combine word and phonetic methods. He believes that by using phonetics, a student develops the habit of reading thoughtfully” He also says “the training of the ear in perception of phonetic blends’ will promote recognition.
The book “Sounds The Letters Make” by Lucille D. Schoolfield, and Josephine B. Timberlake, 1940, has our theme in the title-“sounds”. You have to hear sounds. This book is about teaching the alphabet. The authors state in the forward, that children recognise a dog by his bark…they need to associate letters to their sounds”.
By seeing a letter in a word and saying it out loud, makes for a higher success rate in memorization, and in recognising to pronounce.
My favorite book to read out loud is “Chicken Soup with Rice” by Maurice Sendak, 1962. It has good illustrations, but more importantly, it is a good book to hear the music of words. I have read this book to my kids, and to my grandkids. I even had the opportunity several years ago to be invited to to school and read this to an entire class of first graders.
So I believe that we should have a Read Aloud Day more than once a year. Many stories and poems are meant to be heard. So keep reading-loudly.
But remember, libraries make Shhhhh happen.
Librarytomes 