Reading Aloud Assignment

For this reading aloud assignment, I read aloud to my two younger cousins, Kate who is five and Alec who is three. I loved reading aloud to them because I feel like it brought me closer to them. The books I read to them ranged from books we had all read before to books none of us had ever read. It was a great experience reading aloud the books that we had all read before because we would all say the key phrases together and it would be a bonding experience. It was also fun to read the new books together too because it was an experience we all had together to try and figure out what was going to happen next. When I first started to read aloud to them I feel like I would just read the story to them in a monotone voice. I didn’t read in different
voices or change the pitch of my voice. The more I read to them, the more comfortable I felt reading aloud. I started to change my voice to fit different characters and would make an emphasis on certain words. I would also read louder or quieter depending on the story and what was happening in it. By the end of my time reading aloud with them I was using different expressions and movements and I was embodying the character as I read. I can definitely see progress in my reading from the beginning of this assignment to the end. Not only did I see growth in myself as I read aloud to my cousins but I also saw growth in them. In the beginning they would just sit there and listen to me and as time went on they would ask more questions and join me as I read. As I read aloud to my cousins I realized that it was more of a group effort than an individual effort. I wasn’t just reading to my cousins and my cousins weren’t just listening. Instead, we would read and listen together and talk about the book together. Over the past couple weeks I learned a lot about reading aloud to children. I incorporated what we learned in class about reading aloud as I read to my cousins. This included positioning myself so that my cousins could see the illustrations of the book as I read it to them, using facial expressions to enhance the story, maintaining eye contact and changing the pitch of my voice. All of these examples that we learned in class, I will definitely incorporate in my future classroom as I read the children stories. My cousins loved when I made the characters in the story come to life with I used different voices. Throughout my time reading aloud to my cousins, I found three common core standards that related to what I did with them.
One of the standards included asking and answering questions. Sometimes I would ask a question to my cousins about what they think would happen next or how they think certain characters feel and other times my cousins would ask me questions. I think that asking and answering questions is a huge part of reading aloud because questions are a great way to learn or think about something differently. Another standard is making connections in the book. I would talk about the relationships between the characters with my cousins and make connections between different events in the book.
The third standard that related to my experience reading aloud to my cousins was describing the relationship between the text and the illustrations. One specific example that I remember as I read Horton Hears a Who to Alec, was spotting the speck of dust. On every page of the story we would try and find the speck of dust that was in Whoville. It would be like a little scavenger hunt because I would read the page and then we would look for the speck of dust together. Overall I had a great experience reading aloud to my cousins and I loved every minute of
it.