Story Time

Reading aloud to children is not all about knowing what animal noises goes with what animal. No, it's much more than that. Children naturally gravitate towards nice sounds, whether its an emphasis on a certain word, or speaking a word very softly or loudly. There are so many possibilities of how to convey a story to a child when doing read alouds. Not every person are going to read the same story in the same way, and that is the beauty of reading aloud to children. In every situation, there is an opportunity to captivate that child's imagination and in that moment, anything can happen. A giraffe in the book suddenly comes alive in that child's mind and all of a sudden there are so many other things a child can then add to the book. Having the children tell the story in their own way can tell the reader or teacher so much about how a child really interprets the story and what literacy means to the child. Is literacy static? No, it's an ever changing, ever evolving process, that is never dull in a child's mind. Using puppets or animal noises, like most people think, is just scratching the surface of the possibilites of how a teacher can use story time to really engage a child's imagination. It's up to the teacher to really take just a few small steps to really change that dull boring book about the zoo into a book about magical and exciting new places the child will journey too that day in read alouds.