There are so many terrific books and therefor so many terrific read alouds. Most of them, with a little ingenuity, can be used for various comprehension think-alouds, turn 'n talks, stop 'n jots or stop 'n acts. What can be tricky is when you're trying to find a book for a particular comprehension strategy. For example, if I want to do a reading workshop unit on making connections because my 1st graders have a limited understand of it, or because I want my 5th graders to go deeper into activating their background knowledge and making text-to-text and text-to-world connections that matter, then I need to find books that allow me to model the strategy through a think-aloud AND allow my students to access the material, find relevance and make their own connections.
While choosing a book to match a strategy does work, the work of Lucy Calkins and the reading and writing project staff encourages teachers to read a text as a reader and to notice what strategies we actually use as a reader with an individual book to plan our think-alouds and intentional stopping points for the active engagement that is the hallmark of interactive read aloud. Is this a lot of work? Yes, of course. But, they will tell you it is okay to not finish a book every day with many classes. You can take two days to read your interactive read aloud text, or long if it's a chapter book. How long depends on your students. Of course, we can use a familiar read aloud as a mentor text for a mini-lesson about one comprehension strategy we want to teach.
Another option is to use a great teacher's resource, the Interactive Read-Aloud series by Linda Hoyt, to help you choose and teach books. I especially like how the K-1 and 2-3 versions have a shared reading text AND a readers theater to match each read aloud. In addition to the ideas of what think-alouds and active engagement to do where, there are questions to help discussion and reflection at the end, including standardized test style questions. (The higher levels may have a shared reading as well, I don't know, but they definitely have the not-too-long readers' theater.) This is such a great book that I think all primary teachers should have and use to become experts in Interactive Read Alouds and Shared Reading. Coaches, principals and district leaders, buy this for your teachers!
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Your insights and suggestions
Your insights and suggestions about read aloud books are wonderful. I am a third grade teacher. My fellow teachers and I believe that our "read aloud" time is very important. We like for the kids to take a break and just listen to a story. It is beneficial for the studets to listen to a fluent reader using expression and voice appropriately. We can also choose books that are at a level that is a little higher than what the students may be able to read independently. We try to expose the children to as many differnent genres and styles as possible through our book selections. After 3 years of reading mainly the same books, I asked our librarian for some new choices. She loves when we ask for her help. I told her just to pick a few and she of course had a stack prepared for me of about 15! I like to use as many resources within my school as possible, however I may be looking in to the Interactive Read-Alouds you mentioned.
Thanks!
Hi MCrosier,
I'm glad you enjoyed the post! As a bilingual specialist and being in my second year of collaborative teaching in the gen-ed classroom along with my co-teachers, I don't have all the "fall back" books from previous years, plus I work with three different grade levels (1st-3rd). So I NEED to talk to our librarian more! Thank you for reminding me of that. Plus, I need to get to the public library more.
The Linda Hoyt series is especially fabulous because she has both reader's theater --great for that fluency practice, especially for a class with mostly grade-level students -- and the shared reading options for each book, which is great for classes like mine with great linguistic and reading skill diversity where decoding and vocabulary comprehension is so important. It's a nice resource for finding good books for teaching a particular skill or tell you where to stop and how to actively engage kids during the reading. Because let's face it, we don't always have time to think about what is the best vocabulary to teach, what questions to ask where, etc.. She also includes standardized test-ish questions to ask at the end. She does it all. She even has these great forms to keep track of read alouds and comprehension strategy instruction.
I started a forum for 2nd and 3rd grade read aloud: http://eledblog.com/content/2nd-and-3rd-grade-interactive-read-alouds-comprehension-instruction
And here's a lesson plan which has a similar lay out to Linda Hoyt's: http://eledblog.com/content/miracle-first-poinsettia-read-aloud
Her book is still on my wish list too!
~CCG