Over the last several years, evidence has been building about the importance of reading aloud to children and young adults. It is timely that Meg Philp contacted Reading Time to request a list of books reviewed here be gathered to support this crucial campaign. Meg has written a short insightful piece on why parents and educators should read to children of all ages, and we have included some links to articles providing more information and support.
Reading aloud can put life back into words that have been written down. It’s a step towards oral storytelling and one of the ways parents form a trusting, comforting bond with their children. As a human experience, reading aloud arouses curiosity and is essentially interactive, pleasure-able, and informative.
As a common teaching strategy, reading aloud also enables the learner to make meaning from more difficult, unknown texts across the curriculum: new concepts can be more easily understood.
Reading “with expression,” or fluently, is an acquired skill. The reader’s voice is a flexible tool that may add further meaning and emotion to the text.
New research also shows that listening to a text read aloud is more instructive than everyday talking – the imagination is stimulated, more parts of the brain “fire” at once, while memory, as well as vocabulary, increases, as listeners of any age are drawn into another world by a good reader, with a good book.
Meg Philp | 25 April 2016 | Storyteller
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Thank you Meg for recognising this need. She will be running a workshop at the Grange Library in Brisbane on June 13, 2016, from 4 – 5 pm.
Further information:
Read Aloud Survey Report: How America reads aloud to its children (March, 2016)
Rebecca Bellingham, Why we should all be reading aloud to children, TEDx Talk, (Dec, 2015)
John Elder, Proof of benefits of reading to children, SMH (March, 2013)
Here is the list of Great Read Alouds. We will continue to build on it.