• Building academic vocabulary. • Deepening comprehension. • Modeling all aspects of thinking, talking, and writing about reading. • Demonstrating fluent reading.
• Building an intellectual classroom community of readers. • Introducing and modeling collaborative conversations. • Addressing the requirements of the new rigorous standards. • Fostering a lifelong love of reading. Closing Thoughts At the beginning of The Ultimate Read-Aloud Resource (2016), Lester Laminack addresses teachers directly and encapsulates the heart of the interactive read-aloud: You are the front line in the work of leading children to fall in love with language and literature as they become readers and writers. You are the ones who select the books, who set the tone of the experience, who lure children into a web of texts of all kinds. As teachers you are the daily dose of read aloud. Your voices are the ones that linger in the minds of children as they romp around on the playground, stand in line for lunch, or load onto the bus and head for home at the end of the day. You are the ones who introduce new topics and revisit favorite authors and illustrators or bring in new ones. You are the ones who deepen children’s understanding of genre and open the doors to new ways of looking at life and the world around us. And kindergarten teacher Aeriale Johnson (2018) reminds us that as “professional educators, we have a lot of power. We can use it to limit children to our narrow paradigms, or we can respect their intellectual capacity and fullness as human beings and invite them to co-create a cultural landscape in our classrooms wherein books are valued as friends. We can model, even with our youngest readers, through thoughtful read-alouds, how our book friends render feelings of comfort and joy and provide safe spaces within which children and adults alike can find independence, interdependence, and growth. As one of my students said: “Reading is better than food.”
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CHAPTER 5: TEACH
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