Page 127 - Reading Nest - The Supportive Literacy Environment Handbook

In the learning process reading aloud may have these stages:

• To arouse interest, the teacher would first present the book and show its front and back
cover, talk about the title, author and illustrator. Discussion follows on who the

character(s) might be and what the book is about.

• The children’s age and their ability to concentrate determines whether pictures are shown
during or after reading, and also if children are involved in reading. For instance children

could read out direct speech, rhymes and so on.

• The teacher prepares the discussion: younger children could discuss the main character,
such as Why do you like him? What would you do differently? Has it happened to you

too? and so on. This discussion can also be arranged as pair or group work.

Research has shown that when the teacher reads aloud daily and the meaning of the story

and words are discussed, children's vocabulary grows remarkably along with skills in
analysis, reasoning, writing, understanding texts and shared knowledge is created.

Visualisation should be used with preschool children and those with a different first

language, such as drawings, illustrations, photos, puppets and other props. These would
also help maintain concentration during the reading, and are useful when retelling the

story later and arranging events in a sequence. For further visualisation in the case of a

picture book, more important pictures could be copied, cut out (and also laminated) and
displayed on a magnetic board. Illustrations could be drawn on a board during reading by

the teacher or children while the story’s characters could also be made as puppets and
used in retelling later; the teacher might also find suitable toys, like three bears in different

sizes.

A wonderful tool is using a story sack: a bag with a drawstring contains e.g. a book, one

or more characters, other props, audio recording of the story, a topic-related book, games
etc. (Mukherji & O’Dea 2000).