One District, One Book Reading tips

Monroe Road Elementary School is gearing up for an exciting month of reading activities for National Reading Month. Beginning on March 1st, many community members, including students, teachers, and families will be participating in the One School, One Book project. We will be reading E. B. White's classic story, The Trumpet of the Swan.

Many parents have asked for some tips and tricks for reading aloud with their child. Here are ten tips for creating and fostering a love for reading.

Ten Tips for Reading Aloud

1. How to Choose a Book - Make sure you marry the right reading style with each book: Roddy
Doyle’s The Giggler Treatment (about dog poop) asks for a wry, arch, playful style - lots of enthusiasm; Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins suggests a quieter, deadpan style - it’s a story about Nature, so let the prose do the work.

2. How to Make the Time - If reading aloud is important, you must prioritize: Sometimes this means
doing something else (the dishes, say) later; sometimes it means not doing something else (Monday
Night Football isn’t that good this week); and sometimes it means making something boring - say, waiting at the doctor’s office - interesting.

3. Punch Vocabulary - Make the language in a story more interesting for both you and your listener by choosing the most interesting word in each sentence, and doing something more with it: emphasize it, italicize it, underline it, enunciate it, whisper it, elongate it - bring it out to some (subtle) place of prominence and enliven the prose.

4. Pause - One of three tips that help re-set your child’s attention span and can be used to heighten
drama or suspense or emotional impact; in this case, pay special attention to every mark of punctuation: every comma and period, hyphen and parentheses. One word sentences are written that way for a reason.

5. Slow Down - Also re-sets attention span; and heightens drama, suspense, and emotion; but not the
same as pausing; slowing down means adjusting the pace of a sentence; or a paragraph; your listener
will notice immediately.

6. Whisper - Everyone knows the whisper effect, when you want to make someone pay even closer
attention; so this one also re-sets the attention span; heightens drama and suspense and - especially -
can make the most malevolent characters even more malevolent.
- Together, these three tips - Pause, Slow Down, Whisper - represent the pure heart of effective
reading aloud.

7. Accents and Voices - Borrow indiscriminately and shamelessly from everywhere to mimic different
voices; you kids don’t care how perfect they are, only that the voices in a dialogue are different and
distinct, bringing the characters alive. Also: give each character who talks a lot some identifying trait or mannerism to make it easier for you to trigger the voice (e.g. Draco Malfoy lords it over everyone - perhaps he drawls or sneers; Hermione Granger is a goody-goody - perhaps her voice is a little prissy.)

8. Ask Questions - Use the opportunity and pace reading a book give you to ask questions before,
during, and after a reading; to serve multiple purposes: rehearse or remember characters or plot
developments; explore moral or ethical questions; make associations with other books and media - film and otherwise.

9. Give ‘em a Quiz - Not to make reading like school, but as a memory cue; kids love showing off their knowledge, having a reason to pay even closer attention, owning a book or story thoroughly and in detail. Pretty soon, they’ll be asking you questions.

10. Permit an auxiliary activity - Kids will get distracted - for a good reason: because they’ve made an association and are pursuing it. When pausing and whispering and slowing down aren’t enough, it’s OK to let them color or draw or doodle - or braid their hair or wash the dishes - to let their restless minds refocus on your story.