Sharing Our Love of Reading Aloud

My husband and I have been reading aloud to our kids since they were in utero. Our love of books has made it an easy and fun activity.

As our kids have grown, we’ve continued to read aloud to them. Sharing a book together has been a special way to connect.

If you follow MarbleSpark happenings, you know about our literacy initiative, Project OpenBook, where we give away copies of our kids poetry book, The Yeti in My Freezer, to deserving kids without access to books at home.  

Our wish has always been to read the poems aloud to the kids and hand the books out individually rather than drop a pile of books at a nonprofit for distribution. We wanted to expand our love of reading aloud to kids besides our own!

Reading Aloud

Reading aloud and sharing the poems with students has been one of the best parts of this experience. They make the poems come alive. We have read them in schools to kids grades Kindergarten thru 4th grade plus to younger kids at various book readings throughout the area.

But there’s more to it than the warm fuzzies we get from reading aloud. Jim Trelease in The Read-Aloud Handbook states, “The single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children.”

Let’s say that again. The single most important activity for success in reading is reading aloud.

MarbleSpark has been a corporate partner of the national campaign, Read Aloud, for several years. The organization encourages reading aloud every day and has the tagline: “Read Aloud 15 Minutes. Every Child. Every Parent. Every Day.”

They highlight the many benefits of reading aloud, including:

• Literacy skill building
• Language development
• Instills a love of reading
• Brain development
• Bonding
• Knowledge gained and shared

Despite this knowledge, many parents don’t read aloud to children from a young age. This is especially true for children in low-income families. Many of these children are also less likely to have exposure to books at home.

This is why Project OpenBook is near and dear to us. It gives kids a book to take home to keep and enjoy, and they also receive the benefits listed above when we read the poems aloud in class.

Recent Book Drop 

Our latest book drop allowed us to read aloud to four grades and give away 165 books. I told the kids to use their imaginations when listening to the poems. Afterwards, I asked questions to spark their imaginations and received a number of raised hands waving madly in the air with the hopes I’d call on them!

These kids were smart cookies and their answers made me think of the poems differently, too. And let’s not forget they made me laugh…kids are the funniest!

Reading aloud opens them up to the stories/poems and leads to discussions the kids might not otherwise have had. When they read The Yeti in My Freezer at home, they might remember what we talked about in class regarding that poem. And that might make them think differently about what they are reading and seeing in the illustrations.

Sharing our love of reading aloud has been a joy. We look forward to many more read alouds both at home and in schools!