Read Alouds
Overview
Listening to and observing fluent readers provides a helpful model for learners to understand how to engage with texts and develop their own reading abilities.
Example: Use This Strategy In in the Classroom
Design It into Your Product
Use It in the Classroom
Watch how a first grade teacher uses a read-aloud to dive deeper into a text. By pausing during the reading to verbalize her thoughts, she models questioning, inferencing, and using context cues. With these supportive prompts, students are able to practice these strategies to develop their Narrative Skills and connect elements of the text with their Background Knowledge.
Design It into Your Product
Learn how MeeGenius allows users to not only listen to narrated books but also follow along by highlighting the words as they are being read. Having the audio pronunciation simultaneously with a visual highlight cue helps early readers develop Decoding, Phonological Awareness, Morphological Awareness, and Sight Recognition.
Learn More
- Explore the importance of facilitating text-based discussions from Digital Promise's Ask a Researcher
- Explore the Reading & Cognition subtopic on Digital Promise's Research Map.
Additional Resources
Additional examples, research, and professional development. These resources are possible representations of this strategy, not endorsements.
Factors Supported by this Strategy
More Teacher Modeling and Support Strategies
Teachers can support language development by using and providing syntax that is appropriately leveled (e.g. short, simple structure for young students).
Teachers support language development by using and providing Vocabulary that is appropriately leveled (e.g. using Word Wall words).
Content that is provided in clear, short chunks helps students develop their Working Memory skills.
Maintaining consistent classroom routines and schedules ensures that students are able to predict what will happen next.
Teaching students how to label, identify, and manage emotions helps them learn self-regulation skills.
Attributing results to controllable aspects (strategy and effort) fosters students' beliefs in self.
Learning about students' cultures and connecting them to instructional practices helps all students feel like valued members of the community.
Overtly encouraging all students to ask when they have forgotten something creates a classroom that supports risk-taking and skill development.
By talking through their thinking at each step of a process, teachers can model what learning looks like.
Teachers sharing text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections models this schema building.
When teachers share their goals and the paths they take to achieve them, they demonstrate that learning involves effort, mistakes, and reflecting.
Talking with students about what they know about the topic of upcoming work helps activate their Background Knowledge or reveals gaps.
Reading aloud books about skills children are learning provides another model for their development.
