Classmate
Jana explores reading aloud to older children in her blog.
I work at a high school and two of my own boys are high schoolers, so I found
the piece intriguing and I can attest to read-alouds being an effective way to
disassociate an assignment with the printed word, a concept referred to as the “sweat
mentality” in the Scholastic article. My older boys used to love to read when
they were in elementary school. What happened? They’ve come to believe that
there’s a lot more to experience in life than a good book. We try to squeeze it
in when we can. We’ve spent many hours listening to audio books on road trips.
Our absolute favorite is Harry Potter, as read by Jim Dale. One of my
boys was a better auditory than visual learner, and a lot of the concepts and
themes were reinforced as he read the text at home and listened to the book
when we were in the car.
This
can even be connected with the spoken word movement, and the idea that stories
have different ways of being shared. The same phrase can sound different and
mean something different when spoken by two different individuals.
In
this article,
Jim Brozina writes about reading aloud to his daughter for 3,218 straight days,
up until she left for college. If you’re up to reading it, grab some tissue. I
do admit, this situation is exceptional in illustrating the bond that can occur
when reading together.
I
tend to waffle when it comes to celebrating some things in my high school
library. Will the students find it too immature? I wanted to do something for
Dr. Seuss’ birthday, but my older boys told me it would probably be a waste of
time. Why?! He inspired so many kids to read and took us past the boring
Dick-and-Jane books. So I decided to bake cookies for the teachers and hoped it
would somehow encourage them and help them remember why we do what we do.
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