From: Robin Smith <robinsmith59>
Date: Thu, 12 Aug 2004 18:03:09 -0500

Dean Schneider writing from Robin Smith's e-mail:

Lisa Von Drasek and I seem to have very similar tastes in read-alouds. I would second all of the ones she mentions. I have already read aloud the first chapter of Richard Peck's forthcoming The Teacher's Funeral: A Comedy in Three Parts to many people. Such a funny scene and, despite the title, the whole book ends up being a tribute to teachers. And I'd add Sarah Ellis's fine The Several Lives of Orphan Jack as a perfect read-aloud for all ages. Her early scene where Jack is imagining being a book-keeper is funny and offers a great way to see our work with children and books.

Reading aloud is a subject very important to me. We read aloud to our own children from the time they were born (or before) to about sixth grade, when they each seemed to get bogged down in homework and other activities. But think of all of those years, hearing books every single night, without fail. I just can't imagine parents not reading aloud. And it's not just for the educational benefits, which are legion, it's the time of day when you and your children have each other's undivided attention, sitting next to each other enjoying being together with nothing else to do but sharing great books. L. Frank Baum, E. B. White, and Lloyd Alexander feel like old, family friends for the time they were part of evenings. I read aloud every OZ book -- fourteen, I believe, and approximately 3,500 pages -- one year, and all of Lloyd Alexander's Vesper Holly series, Prydain Chronicles, and others, and E. B. White's three books over and over. My son loved The Trumpet of the Swan, and listened to it over and over on long car trips to Maine. Alan Bennett's wonderful rendition of Winnie the Pooh also practically wore out our tape player on those trips, his way with voices is so wonderful. (Parents need not worry about doing voices if they don't come naturally; just read fluently, letting the story and the closeness with your kids carry the book.)

My wife (Robin Smith) reads aloud 200 picture books a year and a chapter book or novel every two or three weeks in her second grade classroom. Polly Horvath's The Trolls is a fixture in her program now, and Despereaux was a huge hit, well before it became so popular.

It's hard for me, teaching two different 7th-grade classes and an 8th, to have three read-aloud sessions every day, but I do read aloud best scenes and chapters from class novels, short stories, poetry, etc. And students do reader's theater to bring alive the language of the novels we are reading together. I plan to take Lisa's suggestion of Sonya Sones's Stop Pretending as a read-aloud with my 8th graders this year. Sones's books are such hits with my 7th and 8th graders, and that genre of novels in verse has great potential for teachers with several different classes each day.

I wrote in Book Links magazine a while back (May 2003): "We all know that certain things are true. We know the importance of reading aloud to children, reading good books together, making sure kids have good books available and that they have the time to read them. Yet we fill students' time with worksheets and textbooks, grammar lessons, vocabulary lists, standardized tests, computer games, and assorted busy work. At home, we fill kids' lives with a frenzy of planned activities and electronic diversions. If we put the things we know to be true at the heart of our lives, we would see wonders in our classrooms and homes."

I won't go into the educational benefits of reading aloud here. They are well described in Jim Trelease's The Read-Aloud Handbook and his great website, www.trelease-on-reading.com

Are others of you out there seeing a decline in the number of parents reading aloud to their children? Robin used to feel that out of the 20 second graders in her class, maybe 16 were being read aloud to at night. Now, she wonders if more than four or five are. It's an irony of our world -- with so many wonderful books being written, so many fine writers out there -- that fewer kids are lucky enough to hear the books or have parents willing to take them to libraries and bookstores. But maybe that's just my perspective from my particular school, which is a quite affluent school where parents certainly have the resources to support books and reading.

But we teachers, librarians, and parents who are passionate about books are where it happens. We read to our own children and encourage reading aloud wherever and whenever we can. We need to be advocates with friends, at parent nights at school, with fellow teachers and librarians, at conferences. It would be easy to be gloomy about the future of reading, but I prefer to celebrate the whole world of wonderful children's books out there and do what I can, where I am, to connect children with those books!

Dean Schneider Ensworth School Nashville, Tennessee schneiderd at ensworth.com
Received on Thu 12 Aug 2004 06:03:09 PM CDT