Consider Reading Aloud an Intervention
As responsive teachers build trusting relationships with their students and start to know their students as learners and human beings, they recognize that daily read alouds are also interventions. When teachers' read alouds become a daily routine, they form, strong bonds among students with books and stories—bonds that also foster community. When students listen to read alouds, they develop their imagination while picturing settings, characters, and events. They meet and hear a wide range of literary genres and begin to understand how each one works; they develop literary tastes and discover authors to explore; they tune their ears to literary language and words used in different contexts; they develop their listening capacity and experience pleasure in hearing stories and learning information from past, present and future worlds. Read alouds form and enhance students’ literary foundation, developing students’ prior knowledge about how stories and informational books work—a prerequisite for intervening with volume in reading.
Ramp Up the Reading Volume for Developing Readers
When volume in reading is the core intervention for developing readers, they can experience the value and joy of reading, the excitement of learning new information and meeting new people, laughing, enjoying conversations about books with peers, as well as understand the connection between skill practice and reading wonderful books. As you read the list of “15 Benefits of Independent Reading,” reflect on the power of volume in reading as the core intervention for developing readers.
15 Benefits of Independent Reading
1.Refines students’ understanding of applying strategies, for during independent reading, students have multiple opportunities to practice what they learn during instructional reading.
2.Develops an understanding of how diverse genres work as readers figure out the likenesses and differences among realistic, historical, and science fiction, fantasy, mystery, thrillers, biography, memoir, informational texts, etc.
3.Enlarges background knowledge and deepens readers’ understanding of people as they get to know different characters.
4.Builds vocabulary as students meet and understand words in diverse contexts. Independent reading, not vocabulary workbooks, is the best way to enlarge vocabulary because students meet words in the context of their reading.
5.Teaches students how to self-select “good fit” books they can and want to read.
6.Develops students’ agency and literary tastes. Choice builds agency and as students choose and dip into diverse genres and topics, they discover the types of books they enjoy.
7. Strengthens reading stamina, their ability to focus on reading for 20-minutes to one hour.
8. Improves silent reading. Through daily practice students develop their in-the-head reading voice and learn to read in meaningful phrases.
9.Develops reading fluency because of the practice that voluminous reading offers.
10.Supports recall of information learners need as they read long texts that ask them to hold details presented in early chapters in their memory so they can access these later in the book.
11.Improves reading rate through the practice that volume provides.
12.Develops students’ imagination as they visualize settings, what characters and people look like, conflicts, decisions, problems, interactions, etc.
13.Fosters the enjoyment of visual literacy when students read picture books and graphic texts.
14. Creates empathy for others as students learn to step into the skin of characters and experience their lives.
15.Transfers a passion for reading to students’ outside-of-school lives and develops the volume in reading students need to become proficient and advanced readers.
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