You Need to Do a Teacher Read Aloud in the Classroom

Taking the time to do a teacher read aloud with your class has many benefits and is easy to implement.

Why Should I do a Teacher Read Aloud?

I take at least 10-20 minutes of the school day to do a teacher read aloud to my class of students. It is a time I prioritize, making sure that everyone is available and not pulled out by another teacher during that time.

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The Magic of the Teacher Read Aloud

It is amazing how little the entire class is together during the school day, which makes this a big investment in the precious resource of time. It’s a worthwhile investment because reading aloud to my students continues to nurture and develop life-time readers, not school-time readers as Jim Trelease likes to call it. He defines school-time readers as students who ‘read well enough to graduate but pretty much stop on graduation day.’

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Reading aloud, as a parent or teacher, helps the child

associate reading as a pleasant activity
builds vocabulary
develops background knowledge
provides a reading role model
hear advertisements for a variety of books and genres
connect with the teacher in a low-risk activity
develops the art of listening

Words are the foundation for learning

Reading aloud to your students even if it’s for just 5-10 minutes a day, supports the building of a rich vocabulary in a relaxed manner. School is often a stressful place for students. With the rise in anxiety in our students over the past few years, lack of focus and rigorous teaching expectations to name a few stressors, I am happy to provide a lighthearted break in which I model for students my love of reading.

How Do I Do a Teacher Read Aloud?

First and foremost, have fun! Pick a book that you enjoy or that the school librarian or another teacher reader recommends. It is no fun to read aloud the dictionary to students. If you don’t find your book interesting everyone else in the room won’t like it either.
You need to be the one reading aloud. DO NOT play the audio or YouTube version of a book when you are in the room. This could send the message to the students that you don’t care enough to engage with them about the book. There is nothing wrong with the students listening on their own time to an audio recording of a book, but it is not the way for you to connect and model with your students.
Listen to the audio version before you start the read aloud. For some books, especially fiction, it is great to hear how the narrator reads names as well as emphasizes voices and emotions. The books that I enjoy reading aloud to my class the most are the ones that I have personally listened to and that helped me to develop the character’s voices as I read.
Display the text (if you are able). I project the text from my document camera onto the board in my room. This is helpful for my visual learners to tract the text as well as enjoy any illustrations that accompany the text.
Try to read a variety of fiction and informational text. This is not an absolute, but it is a great scaffold to support students in the area of informational text.
Find out what works for you. The past few years I have enjoyed reading Harry Potter aloud in my classroom. I am amazed at the amount of students who have not read the books and quite a few have not seen the movies since the movies are over a decade old. However, I am not surprised that many students gave up on Sorcerer’s Stone. The entire world of Harry Potter is amazing and I devoured the books . . .after I got through the first 100 pages of Sorcerer’s Stone. Harry doesn’t get to Hogwarts until about the 80th page. While J.K. Rowling is doing a lot of world building in the beginning of the series, it can be kind of dry for students who struggle to engage. I have read Sorcerer’s Stone a few times to my class- it is one of the more manageable Harry Potter read alouds because it is not an insane length of pages. It was a worthwhile investment in the amount of students that then continued on to finish the rest of the series independently. The only thing is, Sorcerer’s Stone is one of my least favorite Harry Potter books and I got tired of reading the same old story! So I decided I would read a Harry Potter book that I enjoy quite a bit and that is not an overwhelming amount of pages. I read Prisoner of Azkaban because I am the teacher and I can do what I want! It was such a delightfully juicy read and was not difficult to bring the kids up to speed with the series. Again, do what works for you.
Don’t make reading aloud a test. This should be for pleasure and no grades or comprehension quizzes should be taken during this time.
Read about reading aloud in the classroom. Check out Trelease’s Read Aloud Handbook or Steven Layne’s In Defense of Read-Aloud to learn more about best practices in the classroom.

I hope that you find value in reading aloud to students no matter their age. One of the best parts of my day is when a student comments on a voice I used for the read aloud or asks me to read a particularly disgusting part of an informational text. It brings me such joy because I know they are loving it as much as I am!

I also find joy when we check out books in the library and any book I have read aloud tends to get checked out consistently for the remainder of the year. I know my plan is working and I love it!

Get Into the Read Aloud Spirit

I love me some adorable reading themed teaching t-shirts. They make me happy!

Reading themed t-shirts are perfect for any day of the week but especially fun on pajamas days. What really goes with colorful flannel pants or my holiday themed penguin flannel pajama pants? Nothing really, which is why reading t-shirts are the best! Here are a few of my favorites-

Read Alouds are my favorite– Esty