Reading to Your Child & Helping Your Child Learn to Read Are Not the Same

"Research is also clear that reading to kids - whatever its benefits - has little or no impact on the development of (reading) skills that are so prominent in the early grades...(where) texts only use limited numbers of words and depend heavily on words known to be in kids' early oral vocabularies." (Dr. Timothy Shanahan)

This is the 23rd blog post entry of the 2019-20 school year. Last entry we explored some ideas for promoting and encouraging reading at home through these unusual days. 

Parents are encouraging their children to listen to teacher read alouds each day on the Pod blogs, and are reading to them as well at home. 

Many of the strategies explored in this blog are ideas parents might use to help their children develop their own reading skills, using basic, early reading books that are not related to all the benefits derived from the many read alouds children enjoy each day. 

Learning to read independently is a unique journey and requires dedicated, ongoing support. Classes may be cancelled but teachers and parents alike continue to support this steady practice of reading skills to ensure children become proficient and joyous readers!

In conversation with a parent recently (virtually, of course!), I was asked to explain the difference between reading aloud to a child and helping a child learn to read, and it occurred to me that I haven't really delineated the distinction between the two as clearly in this blog as perhaps I could. So, in this blog entry - the 23rd dedicated to home reading this school year - that is what we are going to explore: the differences between reading to your child aloud and helping your child learn to become an independent reader. 

Benefits of Reading Aloud 

Reading aloud to your child brings many significant benefits - most of which have been explored in this blog in great depth, so I will just summarize them quickly: significantly greater awareness of vocabulary and pronunciations; introduction of many different topics, ideas and genres as families read through multiple stories each year; opportunities for re-reading favourite books and stories to reinforce vocabulary, character development, language patterns; opportunities to develop 'favourite' reading material choices, genres, authors; opportunities to discuss ideas, explore text features such as maps or charts, make connections to personal experiences, movies, etc; build stronger family relationships as a result of shared experiences. 

Benefits of Supporting Your Child Learning to Read

Learning to read is, as I have mentioned numerous times in this blog, an idiosyncratic journey for each reader that follows some general directions without adhering to the same paths. It requires much practice over many years, trying out new strategies and approaches as text complexity increases. There are some basic skills readers need to get started that are quite similar - once these are mastered, learning to read becomes even less similar from child to child as they indulge in their own favourite texts and interests. Parents who are able to successfully support their child's practice of reading at home will notice enhanced interest in learning to read and be able to celebrate the small successes that seem to occur frequently throughout the reading journey. As parents note these successes and support continued growth, children appreciate both the help and the celebration and are more likely to want to continue growing as a reader. The greatest benefit of supporting a child on the learning to read journey is watching a successful, joyous reader develop in your child!

How to Help Your Child Learn to Read

There are literally hundreds of thousands of research studies and articles that describe and detail how to help a child learn to read. Many of these research projects focus on highly specific learning challenges that may not necessarily occur in every child, while others seek to find 'one way' to best support the majority of learners who are new to the experience of independent reading. In my opinion, the key ways parents might help their child learn to read can be distilled into four basic approaches:

                   1) have your child read aloud to you every day for a few minutes and use this as the starting point for helping with reading

                   2) practice high frequency sight words daily

                   3) make learning to read fun with games and small challenges

                   4) teach your child rhymes, chants and songs from the time they are newborns

Listen to Your Child Read Aloud Every Day

From Kindergarten forward, this is often called 'home reading' and children will bring home appropriately written early reading materials with repetitive phrases, vocabulary and limited text for the earliest readers. These are often called 'controlled text' stories and are designed to help children build awareness of phonology, letters, high-frequency words and text patterns (such as sentence structure, paragraphs, etc). As you listen to your child read aloud their 'learning-to-read' book, remember that learning requires generosity, permission to make mistakes and correct them, and ideas for making learning easier. Learning is not about correcting mistakes, it is about learning from mistakes. And learning requires strategies such as those often mentioned in this blog. 

Before your child begins reading, take a walk through the book with them - what is the title? What is the book about? Ask how they know this? What do the pictures imply (predicting) will happen in the story? Doing this allows the child to become familiar with the ideas of the story beforehand and takes some of the pressure off as they enter the text. As children become more proficient at reading, this pre-reading strategy becomes less important but it is critical with the earliest readers.  When your child is ready, prompt them to take the lead and begin reading. Listening to your child read aloud helps you understand what their strengths and challenges are with reading - they will pause and try to make sense of a word so give them lots of time. Sometimes I will say 'if you need help, put your thumb up and I will help' and this gives them control. This puts the child in charge of prompting and encourages them to try, knowing there will be help if they cannot figure out a particular word. It does not mean I necessarily will give them the word - sometimes I point out the word on a different page where they decoded it successfully before to job their memory, sometimes I will prompt them to look at the first sound and the ending sound, or refer to a picture. Sometimes I will say 'this word rhymes with..." or have them identify a small word inside the larger word. If they are still not able to figure out the word, I will ask them 'does ___make sense?" and give them the word. When we get to the punctuation at the end of the sentence, I will say something like 'that was a tough word!' and re-read the sentence with expression and then ask them to re-read it to, pointing to each word as we go.  And always praise what they have done well - it is in the little successes that real growth in reading builds.

The books are short at these early reading stages with very limited text but it is in working to decode, accepting prompts and re-reading for fluency that oral reading awareness grows.

High Frequency Words

There are many words that are used repeatedly in all text, but most particularly in simple texts. These are the utilitarian words (such as the, said, then) as well as the words most familiar to children (run, bike, bed, brother).  If a child learns the 100 most commonly used words (and there are numerous lists of these available), then reading immediately becomes smoother, easier and more fluent.  Teachers will often provide word lists for parents and practice them with children in school. Helping your child identify sight words in a list is a similar process to supporting them with oral reading - prompt when stuck, use word families if possible, point out beginning/end sounds. Usually children will begin to build a strong sight word vocabulary in a few short weeks with repeated exposure and practice. 

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Playing Games to Make Learning to Read Fun

There a many word-construction games available for young children to help them become better readers, and simple oral games can help as well. Making lists of words that end with 'all', for example, helps children understand words belong in families and beginning sounds matter (ball, call, fall, mall, etc). Kids can orally play such games for a few minutes happily and will often make up games of their own. What parents are highlighting in these games are the phonology of words - another way to bring awareness to printed text.

Rhymes, Chants & Songs

Learning nursery rhymes (like the rhymes from Mother Goose), simple poems, chants and songs are simple ways to remind our youngest readers that words follow patterns. 30 years ago, when children came to school the majority of them came with awareness of nursery rhymes and understood that words came in families based on that knowledge - an easy concept for teachers to expand. Today, many children have never heard nursery rhymes or poetry before entering school and are not as aware of word families and patterns. They remain easy to teach, learn and make up silly rhymes and sayings with young children - and this, again, builds awareness of sounds, phonology and word rhythms. 

Listening to your child read aloud and offering them the time to sound out or use a strategy to identify an unfamiliar word, as well as a prompt if needed and praise for work well done is foundational to someone on the learning to read journey. Parents can provide comfort and support through this process as their child becomes an increasingly proficient reader. Practicing high frequency words, rhymes and chants and playing impromptu silly word games are all very important and easy ways parents may help a child develop daily into a proficient reader.  And the read alouds bring a rounded experience that includes joy, excitement and interest as well as the most important element of all - relationship - to the learning to read experience.

Reading aloud to a child is not the same experience as helping your child learn to read. Combine the two approaches, however, and the incentive for a young child to become an independent reader will be strong and successful. Parenting is complex in so many ways but supporting the reading journey really just takes time, focus and a positive, generous approach that leaves room for fixups and celebrations of success.

Next week, we will explore the reading-writing connection as a way to further help children become proficient readers in the early grades.

Lorraine Kinsman, Principal

Eric Harvie School 

The Learning-to-Read Journey is a Togetherness Project

"Reading is simply a sequence of symbol interpretation.

By understanding that letters make sounds, we can blend those sounds together to make whole sounds that symbolize meaning we can all exchange with one another. By mastering the symbols and their most common contexts, reading becomes a practice in thought – less about decoding and more about understanding." Teach Thought, Feb. 2020

This is the 22nd blog post entry of the 2019-20 school year. Last entry we explored why there are so many read-aloud opportunities offered during our 'classes cancelled' COVID-19 response, acknowledging that reading aloud at home is the single most powerful thing parents struggling to make sense of a world turned upside down can do when trying to find the time and technology to access this unexpected world of online classroom learning. This blog entry, we are sharing some ideas for promoting and encouraging reading at home through these unusual days!

Our students - your children - are all somewhere on the path of their own learning-to-read journey. The great challenge for teachers and parents is that learning-to-read journeys are not all alike; there are no set of 'activities' or 'sequences' that will guarantee a child will learn to read successfully in unison with their peers. Although there are predictable things to learn to do and understand that may appear to work more successfully with a majority of students in a particular age group, reality means every reader learns in his/her particular own way, and will forge a learning-to-read pathway specific to themselves. Anticipating what the next steps are to support reading growth is usually challenging to identify accurately.  

What does this mean for families with children trying to access online learning resources with a child who is in the early stages of the learning-to-read journey? Well, it probably means parents or older siblings will need to support the early reading student - at least initially - with:

•  daily support with reading and understanding the instructions and directions written by teachers for daily tasks
•  daily home reading support
• support with initially finding out how to locate Pod Blogs, Iris, Google Meet & Google Classroom (although this should not last - young readers may struggle with words but they usually recognize symbols - particularly on digital devices - quickly and support demands will be reduced quickly as they build familiarity)
• support with organization of tasks

However, your child will continue to strengthen and develop reading skills throughout these home-bound days with a little focused support from parents, and feel greater success as s/he begins to navigate the reading required to access the digital world more confidently each day.

Fostering early reading skills at home
Fostering the development of reading skills and strategies with young readers can look and sound quite differently from one child to another, depending on the child's current awareness of reading awareness. They do need to learn all about letters and sounds too, as they begin to 'know' the words they are reading - no doubt about it! However, I think it is really important to remember why kids are learning to read in the first place - to make sense of text and do something as a result of coming to understand the meaning of the text.

Reading is not a solitary experience - be a team :)
Because the ultimate goal of learning to read is to understand text meaning, when I am working with early readers, I try to balance the value of knowing the letters, sounds and words with the need to understand what the words actually say and mean. So, if a child is attempting to read a text and it is a huge struggle to sound out the words, I will read along with them and help them as much as possible with the exception of three or four particular words that repeat frequently throughout that text. Eventually, after a few re-reads, the child begins to 'know' some words on sight. In this way, they begin to feel like they are reading while learning sight words, following the directionality of text, noticing patterns and structures of sentences and how they are placed on a page, perhaps noting text features - such as quotation marks, upper case letters, periods, bold text - and build a comfortable interaction with the text. Getting support for reading to be smooth and understandable is not typically discouraging for children; on the contrary, they are usually grateful for the support so they can make sense of the text. And reading is not a solitary experience at young ages - it is best understood as an ongoing relationship with words that begins with some gentle nudging and encouragement.

One strategy I use often with least-experienced readers is support them with the reading through a page, and then have them go back and re-read the page - with support again if necessary. Sometimes we will do this 3 or 4 times, using different voices or intonations just for fun. It helps them build fluency and to listen for what their reading aloud sounds like as they build familiarity with language cadence and patterns.

Notice letters, patterns, rhymes
Texts written for newest readers frequently have repeating words, patterns of words and rhyming words to facilitate smooth grasp of text cadence, meaning and fluency. Dr. Seuss was a master of this, helping children to both want to read and read successfully with tons of rhymes and nonsense sentences; today many new-reader texts are filled with similar structures. Some children notice rhymes, patterns and word families easily; just as many rarely notice any similarities. I will typically stop and ask a young reader what they notice and, if they don't appear to notice any of these patterns, I will begin to point them out - usually it doesn't take long for them to begin to notice and then we can have some fun with 'what else' questions - like 'what else' rhymes with sock? Rhymes are so much fun to play with once children understand the concept! And if you have ever enjoyed the movie "The Princess Bride", it's a lovely way to showcase rhyming just for fun too :)

Highlight conversations and characters in your conversations
Early readers struggle sometimes to notice when a character in a story is speaking. Sometimes children won't even understand there are characters speaking in a story.  From the earliest first reading I do with small children, I highlight the use of quotation marks to help children understand this is a text with characters and conversation. The first read through of a text with a child always prompts the question, 'what is this story about?' followed by 'are there any people in this story?' and then we are off with  making sense of text. Understanding there are quotation marks present to help the reader understand who is in the story and what it is about offers an enormous boost to young readers; suddenly the story has a framework to it they can relate to and make sense of without just guessing!

Make connections; activate prior knowledge
Every time a child encounters a text, the only way for them to make sense of the story is to make sense of the words.  One of the easiest strategies for making sense of the words is to make connections to our own experiences - have we ever encountered anything like this before? watched a similar movie? tv show? heard a similar story or read something similar to this one? These personal connections help us make sense of text within the contexts of our own experiences and greatly enhance the reading for meaning experience. It doesn't need to be a completely the same experience, just to evoke meaning a child can assimilate into their memory banks for later reference as needed.

These are simple, effective strategies to promote the love of reading in a gentle, nudging way for our youngest learnings on the learning-to-read journey. Learning to read is always most successfully accomplished when parents, students and teachers work together as a team to introduce, practice and polish specific reading skills and strategies - it is the ultimate togetherness project!

Next week we'll look at middle readers - grades 3 and above - who will benefit from other, focused strategies of support while learning at home.


Lorraine Kinsman, Principal

Why Are There So Many Read Alouds in this Online Learning Environment??

(My favourite meme in these days of self-isolation:)

“Given the fact that word mastery in adulthood is correlated with early acquisition of words, shared picture book reading offers a potentially powerful strategy to prepare children for competent literacy skills...Reading aloud is the best way to help children develop word mastery and grammatical understanding, which form the basis for learning how to read.” - Dominec Massaro, Ph.D. 

This is the 21st blog post entry of the 2019-20 school year. Last entry we explored why reading aloud at home is the single most powerful thing parents struggling to make sense of a world turned upside down can do when trying to find the time and technology to access this unexpected world of online classroom learning is simply not working for a family. This blog entry explores why teachers are offering and encouraging so many opportunities for listening to, or reading along with, read alouds as part of students' daily ongoing learning experience through this COVID-19 pandemic. 

It is my intention to begin exploring some learning options such as games and strategies for playing with language to support learning to read at home in the days of COVID-19, but before I do that next week, I want to respond to a few questions I have been asked about why there is a daily read aloud - especially of picture books - on the student blogs they are expected to listen to, in addition to reading with them aloud at home.  I think this is a pretty important question that really gets to the heart of experiential, engaged learning-to-read opportunities at the elementary level of schooling. 

Massaro (2015 - above) noted the correlation between mastery of complex, adult language (both using and understanding it) with the early exposure to - and acquisition of - words in small children. Becoming a highly literate, knowledgeable adult is not an accident; it has it's roots in childhood.  In fact, one could say that literate adults have been well-rooted in a read-aloud world. 

This is a key understanding that supersedes all other socio-economic factors; a child who is offered frequent read aloud interactions will grow up to become a literate adult with greater potential for success in the world regardless of where they grew up, how wealthy their family was, whether university education was present or not. This is a well-documented and researched fact - learning to read can offer powerful opportunities for equity in terms of access to education and opportunity. Not a perfect equalizer, but a powerful one for sure.  

This is the first reason why there are so many read alouds needed in a childhood experience, to gain access to the advanced language forms, structures and vocabulary that will vault a child's awareness from basic, 'lazy' language to advanced, challenging words that extend and provoke thinking and connections in a child's mind.  Massaro, who studies language acquisition and literacy across all ages, noted, "picture books are two to three ties as likely as parent-child conversations to include a word that isn't among the 5,000 most common English words" (2015).  So we offer children multiple opportunities across a school day to interact with read aloud experiences, both with teachers and their peers as well as digitally, because read aloud experiences broaden their knowledge of vocabulary, grammar, language structures, rhythm and syntax. 

If we want our children to grow up to be masters of effective use of language and language comprehension - and I am pretty confident that is what we are all expecting when we send a child to school - then we need to ensure they have multiple opportunities for continually expanding and enhancing language knowledge. Best way to do this is through read aloud experiences, frequently and with different voices and interpretations. So we do - we really do - offer children many daily opportunities to participate in read alouds!

Children listen to read alouds - sometimes as they dance around, stand on their heads or build with lego - sometimes just sitting and listening. Whole body listening is something I learned to accept as a young mother when not all of my children would just sit and listen as I read to them every day. Sometimes they snuggled; sometimes they wiggled; sometimes they never made it to the chair at all! Did that mean they were not listening? No! Sometimes the dancer, the prancer, the builder was listening with much greater attentiveness than the quiet one snuggled in beside me. My children taught me not to worry about what their body was doing during the read aloud, becoming a teacher helped me understand that some children need to move while they listen and trying to hold themselves in one position to keep me happy interfered with their understanding of the story as well as their awareness of new language, story structure or a particular rhythm a story might contain. When children listen with their whole body, they are not necessarily tuned out - they are just trying to keep their body entertained so their brain can tune into and connect with the story. Read alouds offer children an opportunity to engage in listening in an active way, making sense of and practicing the language as they also act out the story or recreate it with lego, drawing, etc.

With many years (15!) experience as a grade 5/6 teacher, one of my favourite practices as I engaged in our daily read aloud was to ask the students to always have a pencil and a sketch book in hand when I read. They could be gathered on the carpet for listening (and most were) but I never worried if they wanted to stretch out on their tummies at the back or stand up at a table or tuck under a chair - wherever they were comfortable and could put pen to paper, they would sketch and summarize as I read.  This was not work to be 'marked' or 'graded'; this was their way of actively capturing what the story had to say as we worked our way through a novel or a lengthier picture book. Active listening, whole body listening, quiet listening - whatever works for the child to help them make sense of new experiences and language at work and play. This is another reason for a read aloud.

As children develop their ow reading proficiencies, they begin to also make sense of what they are reading. At first, decoding is painful as they try to sound out the simplest of words. One of the best strategies we can encourage through these early independent read-aloud attempts is to work hard at decoding the word, take a deep breath and go back and re-read the sentence.  This is the most efficient way to make sense of that word they just struggled do hard to decode - and reading it twice helps make it 'stick' longer in the brain when it pops up again on the page a few minutes later - as happens so frequently!  Read alouds take that particular, high energy and concentration responsibility away from the child and encourage listening for the sake of enjoyment - to feel the action in the story, question the character's decisions, laugh or cry out loud. Although a child might be encouraged to read the 'first paragraph' or the 'first 'page' in a book they find challenging, taking over when they are tired of decoding but are still interested in the events, offers a respite in brain engagement that will be most welcomed!

One of the primary reasons I like to promote multiple read aloud experiences in a day for children is the whole aspect of human connection - over the years I have come to understand that children actually seek out, crave and need human connection. Sometimes it seems to me like my grandchildren rarely see humans when they are watching shows on tv or their tablets - so much is animated or anime in the 21st century. While I grew up with the Friendly Giant and Mr. Dress-Up as a Canadian kid, and my children thrived on Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers' Neighbourhood, my grandchildren seem to be immersed in animated experiences that don't include human-to-human interactions most of the time. Am I surprised when they seek out youtube channels with people assembling lego or a small child playing? Hardly! They are, in my opinion, looking for a human to connect with in a deeply rooted human way. Read alouds, shared by other humans who are teachers or people within their circle of experience, offer an opportunity to connect with someone familiar - to say, "Oh! I know that person!" or "Look at my teacher reading at her home!" that promote connection and affection in a way that humans have sought with each other since the dawn of time.  As we share our stories, we are also sharing examples of citizenship, kindness, making mistakes and recovering, caring for each other and learning together. This is a critical component of childhood learning and growth that is easily met through a shared read aloud experience.

In these days of isolation and separation, read alouds offer us opportunities to remember, reflect and re-ignite interests that might otherwise fade in a narrowed world. As we share stories, rhymes, songs, laughter and tears, we also keep our interests in nature, sports, adventure, activity, music, imagination and a multitude of other interests alive and share new experiences, not yet lived, within the pages of a book. Books offer comfort, excitement, information, feelings. They bring us together while acknowledging the power and energy of our differences. In these days when our worlds are contained and narrowed, books invite our imaginations to soar wildly into possibilities we can only imagine just now - and these are powerful energies we need to keep alive during our days of containment. Our bodies may be constrained but books help us know our imaginations need never be! 

These are the biggest reasons why read alouds dominate our daily teaching and learning when classes are in session, and when they have moved to a digital environment. We want our children to take adventures with us, consider provocative questions, imagine new worlds and share in our humanity. For, in the end, we are all living an unimagined experience together in isolation and it is the 'together' part that will sustain us into the future.

Lorraine Kinsman, Principal 

Embrace the Power of the Read-Aloud as a Parent Co-Teacher with Young Readers During a Pandemic...

"In contrast to experiences that are planned from the beginning and designed to be online, emergency remote teaching (ERT) is a temporary shift of instructional delivery to an alternate delivery mode due to crisis circumstances. It involves the use of fully remote teaching solutions for instruction or education that would otherwise be delivered face-to-face.." 

"The primary objective in these circumstances is not to re-create a robust educational ecosystem but rather to provide temporary access to instruction and instructional supports in a manner that is quick to set up and is reliably available during an emergency or crisis."  (Hodges, Moore, Lockee, Trust & Bond, 2020)

This is the 20th blog post entry of the 2019-20 school year. Last entry blended information about teaching reading and learning from home in an introductory manner - this entry picks up the same theme, looking at the work of teaching reading remotely from both the perspective of the parent co-teacher and the responsibility teacher who no longer has daily access to the learning-to-read child. 

The students in our school range in age from 5 to 9 years of age, up to and including grade 4.  Many of our students are fairly competent readers for whatever level they are currently at; all are working extremely hard to improve as readers. As teachers, we know this about the children because we work with them every day on improving reading skills and strategies, as well as comprehension capacities and how to choose and share books until they are well-loved and children find joy in reading. Yet, even with all this daily support, each child learns to read at their own pace and with their own peculiarities. Usually, teachers would adjust and tailor teaching to reflect and make the most of these idiosyncratic learning pieces associated with each student. 

In the face of a pandemic such as we are embroiled in at the moment, all this dedicated work focused on each individual child and the relationships they build with their teachers to be reciprocally trustworthy, flies out the window and boom! we are in an 'emergency remote teaching' model (ERT) that we have never experienced before and parents are now our new co-teaching partners...

Well, we've always been partners in the learning-to-read journey, to be honest. At school we have just had the opportunity to work with students in intentional ways every day. And now, the roles are somewhat reversed. We can offer suggestions and resources, set up live feeds with the children and offer loads of encouragement.  But the reality is, parents are now the ones who are in close contact with the students every day, not the teachers. In this reverse tables model, teachers must rely on parents to be our eyes and ears and 'nudgers' extraordinaire!

First thing to remember is: this is emergency response teaching and should not be considered as the very best, most effective reading instruction ever offered to a student. Nor should expectations for outrageous success because the children are learning at home become an expectation either. From my perspective, our goal in all of this should be to continue to nurture enjoyment in reading, make practicing reading as much fun as possible and try to at least maintain where your child is in the learning to read process - maybe make a few gains here and there, but mostly not slide too much. I think, as an emergency response, this is a realistic stand to take when teaching young children to read in an emergency-riddled world!

Second thing to remember is: if a child doesn't become a fabulous reader by the end of grade 1 or grade 2 or grade 3, the world does not end for them. Learning to read well is an ongoing, continuous process and every person continues to learn throughout their whole life. Yes, we'd like them reading to be ready to move forward with curricula in school. But EVERY child is going through this pandemic and all of them are going to come back to school at some point and we will continue teaching them from wherever they are - teachers will not be skipping over missed skills and hurry on with new teaching - we all know there will be ground to regain with every student - if not in reading, then in another area - including in the area of social skills development. That's what school does all the time - understand where a child is in learning, figure out how best to support those learning needs and then work to encourage and nurture growth in learning. We may spend many weeks in emergency teaching but we will not lose sight of any child when we return. Promise!

Third thing to remember is: learning to read can and should be fun :) Especially during a pandemic! Especially when your teacher can't read with you every day and notice all the little things that say 'be attentive there', 'a little more focus here', 'try this little strategy when' - which is what 'in the moment' teaching offers every child who is learning to read. That is okay - this is an emergency, not a forever or never situation at all - we are all struggling to cope with the strangeness of this emergency and reading will not die out as a human skill if we don't all advance a full grade level (whatever that really means!) when the 2019-2020 school year draws to a close. Keep breathing - that is all that is truly required!

The very best thing any co-teaching parent can do during a pandemic where the teachers are emergency teaching using strategies not usually part of either the teacher's or the child's learning repertoire is focus on reading aloud. Read aloud to your child at least once a day. Let them listen to stories being read aloud by their teacher (if possible) every day. Let them listen to stories online being read by other people (if possible) every day. Encourage your older children to read to your younger children every day. Literally 'book' end every activity with a read aloud - the more words a child hears, the greater their vocabulary, sense of story, language rhythm awareness, ability to predict, identify sounds and phonemes, learn language inflection. And the fun part is that no one has to work at any of this - these are the easily transferable learnings that are inherent in reading. Use reading to calm, to inform, to pique curiosity, to encourage empathy, to tell a good story and prompt the telling of a shared experience. If you do nothing else except read to your child through the pandemic two or three times a day, this will be an awesome way to be an emergency co-teacher :)

Right now, I am reading with my 8-year-old granddaughter every night at 8:00 pm on FaceTime. This is a beautiful way for Ellery and I to stay connected when we cannot see each other; I am reading her one of my favourite novels from my childhood, "Anne of Green Gables". She is learning new words and learning to ask me what they mean because I ask her when we come to one I am pretty sure she doesn't know. But mostly, we are talking about the story. Why I loved it, why she is enjoying it. Yesterday evening she told my daughter she was going to dress and act like 'Anne' for the next 3 days and she immediately went to her closet (and her mother's!) to get clothes to do just that. This morning she got up at 6:30 am and made her bed, brushed her hair and teeth and then went to the kitchen to make everyone tea.  I am not sure that was a welcome experience at 6:30 am on a Sunday during a pandemic for every member of her family, but it demonstrates quite clearly the power of story in a child's life, I think. They can respond with imagination, with trying things on, with being someone else during a time when they really don't know who they are anyway because everything is so different.  This is an excellent way to bring children to the joy of reading!

And, just as an aside, reading with Nana every evening gives everyone else in the house a break from an active 8-year-old for about 30 minutes just before bedtime -  FaceTime is magical for this!

We are posting read-alouds by teachers on our blogs every day through this crisis teaching situation. We, of course, encourage all our students to listen to their teachers' read alouds posted on their own Pod blogs each day - but students are also able to see read alouds on other blogs as well, and on our EHS school youtube channel. We are a school that believes in and celebrates the power of the read aloud in every possible situation - it is our go-to strategy for building joy in reading when school is in session just as much as it is our go-to when classes are unexpectedly and suddenly cancelled. Read alouds are simply the most amazing experience a child can have in their lives and it is perfectly okay (for the children anyway!) to read the same story repeatedly until they ask for a different one :)

As time progresses, teachers will be offering other ideas for supporting reading development at home - word games, rhyming games, strategies for students to make predictions, ask questions, clarify, make connections, make up new stories using drama or puppets or stop motion video - there is no end to the many ways reading can be taught, enjoyed and experienced. But we are in the early days - the first step is to continue to make the most of the read aloud whenever possible. Try and capture a loved one to help out where you can with FaceTime or Skype, encourage your children to read a story together and then act it out for you - whatever it takes to get through the days while making reading the fun experience of the day will absolutely foster the love of reading that will carry every child joyously into learning, even in the most topsy-turvy world imaginable!  And you will enjoy being a most amazing co-teacher of reading :)

Lorraine Kinsman, Principal