Read alouds are those magical times in class where you can share your love of reading, come together as a group to listen to and discuss a shared text, and model good reading strategies, such as reading with fluency and expression, stopping to think, making connections, making predictions…the list goes on and on. Creating a shared experience like this is much more challenging when your students are quarantined at home and you only have a computer screen with which to interact with them.
For those of you who’ve been following along with me this month, you know that we closed our school last Tuesday due to Coronavirus, are all in self-quarantine for two weeks (today’s day 6), and have been teaching virtually since Wednesday. It’s been a steep learning curve for all of us, but we are doing our best to engage our students in learning.
On Friday I posted a video of me reading from our read aloud Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech that we started before the closure. I read with as much expression as I could muster, stopped to think about tricky vocabulary, and made connections to what had happened earlier in the book. At the end of the read aloud, I asked students to make some predictions and post them as a comment underneath the video post on Seesaw. I was so excited to read their comments and see their thoughts about the chapter. They were so engaged! 🙂
Here are their comments on the read aloud:
When I recorded the video for Chapter 10, I started by discussing their predictions and sharing my excitement over their engagement with the story. I hope that their enthusiasm continues as we begin week two of virtual school tomorrow.
In case you’re interested, here’s my video of Chapter 10…
my heart is happiest when i travel. read. write. connect. 