Reconsidering Read-Aloud

Read-aloud is a time of enjoyment and relaxation for teachers and students—a time when powerful, effective teaching and rigorous learning can take place while keeping the pleasures of reading front and center.

Reconsidering Read-Aloud invites you to examine both the spontaneous and planned conversations that take place around read-aloud. If these conversations are led by a teacher who knows books and authors as well as language arts standards, outcomes, and objectives, read-aloud will be a time of teaching that doesn't need a script or a lesson plan to validate it and learning that doesn't need a product to measure it.

Drawing on her career as a fourth- and fifth-grade teacher and her knowledge of children's literature, Mary Lee Hahn shows you how to make your read-alouds count. She provides

• classroom vignettes that demonstrate how read-aloud conversations are teachable moments;
• a practical application of the Apprenticeship Model of teaching, including an appendix that shows how the concepts modeled during read-aloud workshop can be used independently by students in Reading at Home assignments;
• suggestions for choosing books, including an appendix that charts a collection of popular read-alouds;
• examples of teaching strategies that work especially well during all read-alouds, fiction and nonfiction;
• a discussion of the role of evaluation and assessment in read-aloud.

Reconsidering Read-Aloud is a compelling example of the richness that can be found in this daily classroom event. With a love of literature, knowledge of her students, and the desire to teach kids to read more deeply, every teacher can bring the joy of teaching and learning during read-aloud to the classroom.