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Reading Inspires is Reading Is Fundamental’s new podcast celebrating the power of books and the joy of reading. Each episode invites educators, librarians, families, authors, illustrators, and all who champion children’s literacy to explore one big question: What does reading inspire for you? Through engaging conversations and storytelling, Reading Inspires bridges the gap between research and real-world practice—showing what literacy looks and feels like in classrooms, libraries, and homes. Grounded in evidence yet open-ended in approach, this is a space for curiosity and connection. Whether you’re an educator seeking fresh ideas, a parent hoping to spark a love of reading, or simply a lifelong bookworm, you’ll find inspiration, practical insights, and stories that remind us all why reading matters—and how it changes lives.
Karly: our guest facilitator is amazing.
Um, so would love to welcome her now, Dr. Molly Ness.
Um, Dr. Molly Ness is a former classroom teacher reading researcher and longtime teacher educator, um, with a doctorate in reading education from the University of Virginia.
She spent 16 years as an associate professor at Fordham University and is the author of Five Books, a respected literacy leader.
She has served on the International Literacy Association's Board of directors.
Helped found the New York chapter of the Reading League and supported schools, districts, nonprofits, and publishers in implementing research-based reading instruction.
In 2024, she joined the New York State Dyslexia Task Force and founded Regal Literacy.
A consulting firm dedicated to translating the science of reading into classroom practice.
Um, on top of all of that, she's also the creator of the End Book Deserts podcast, which advocates for book access for all children and is also just released a, uh, another new book with, uh, on off orthographic mapping with Scholastic.
And while she's not doing all this amazing literacy work, um, she's cheering on her hockey loving daughter, learning to fly fish or hiking with her mischievous.
Golden Dole.
So, uh, with that, turning it over to you, and thank you, Dr. Molly and s for joining us.
Molly Ness: Well, thank you for having me.
Um, I have long known about the work of reading is fundamental from my days of classroom teaching.
So thrilled to be here and to talk about my favorite topic, which is reading aloud.
Um, where will we go tonight?
Uh, we'll talk a little bit about this.
Science of it.
Some will be familiar and some will be kind of mind blowing, new stuff.
And then we're really gonna focus on what happens when authors are the ones reading to children as, um, RIF has some amazing resources and opportunities here.
And then I'll give lots of ideas about how to make your homes or your classrooms.
A place in which read alouds are joyful.
Reading aloud is a shared activity for students of all ages and all content areas.
So let's start with this gorgeous quote.
40 years ago, the, um, first like federally funded.
Report call, uh, specifically about literacy instruction came out.
Um, it was be, it was called Becoming a Nation of Readers, released in 1985 and calling reading aloud as the single most important activity for building knowledge and literacy success.
So we've long known.
The value of read alouds, and I'm going to specifically focus on the value of read alouds for not just students, but also home read alouds because the science is affirming in, uh, in both different capacities.
So you'll hear me talk tonight about how read alouds build language comprehension, and language comprehension is one of those terms that we often throw around without explicitly defining it.
So really what it means.
Is your ability to make sense of language, whether that language is heard or whether it is written on the page.
I was in a, uh, preschool classroom in Queens, New York a few weeks ago, and the teacher was trying to tell these preschoolers to hurry up with whatever activity that they were doing so that they could move on to the next thing.
And she kept using the expression, telling kids to get on the ball.
Let's get on the ball guys, so we can wrap this up and finish our next, and move on to our next activity.
And a four-year-old turned to me and said, what ball is she talking about?
I don't see a ball.
That's language comprehension.
Because this student didn't understand the implied or or inferred message behind, um, the discourse that was that was being spoken.
So language comprehension is the unconstrained skills at the top part of Hollis Scarborough's reading rope that when I say unconstrained, I mean it's limitless and because it's limitless.
And doesn't have a clear scope and sequence.
It can often be sort of overwhelming to teach.
There's so many vocabulary words, how do I start, how do I know when I, um, can end?
What comes next?
And so those language comprehension skills as we have conversations about reading instruction, um, have to be an explicit focus, not just those sort of clearly mapped out scope and sequence components of word recognition or lifting words off the page.
So when I talk about read alouds, we sort of all know what it is, but there's a couple of things that I wanna focus on in this definition.
First, I'm talking about a read aloud in using it interchangeably as interactive read aloud.
Because the key component here is that conversation and that engagement.
It's the serve and volley of language and it's all around high quality texts.
And I wanna just point out that not, I am not specifically saying high quality picture books.
High quality children's literature because texts can be so broad and for so many different grade levels.
What I love about, um, reading as fundamental their online resources is they have read alouds for nonfiction texts, as well as classic picture books moving all the way up into, um, older reader, uh, support services.
So again, it's high quality text, which is inclusive of so many different components.
The good news is.
Read alouds are one of our favorite things for kids to listen to.
Um, many of our students, this is the thing that they remember most about their second grade teacher or their fifth grade teacher, um, that beloved read aloud, that experience sharing conversation and engagement around a text.
So let's dive a little bit into the science of read alouds as I cite, um, some of this research.
Please don't hesitate to reach out if you're interested in.
Reading the articles themselves.
I'm gonna start first by sort of skimming quickly over the research, which is likely familiar to you in your parent gut or in your teacher gut.
Even if you don't know the citations or the research itself, you've likely seen this effect when you read aloud to students and children.
We know that, uh, read alouds are more likely to lead to students reading themselves.
You are more likely to be, identify, or have.
Self-efficacy in your reading ability.
If you are read to, I saw this as a classroom teacher.
I would read a chapter book by Andrew Clemens and my students would gravitate towards the rest of the Andrew Clemens books that were in the classroom library.
We know that kids who are read to have better academic achievement, they have.
Better background knowledge about all sorts of content areas.
They have better comprehension skills and they have more robust vocabularies, not just the words that they receive, their receptive vocabularies, but also their expressive vocabularies.
We, uh, the words that they themselves use in writing or speaking.
We also know that kids who are read to have better higher order critical thinking skills and can deeply engage with the text.
When we read aloud to kids, we get, uh, we provide them a model, uh, that then can translate to their independent writing.
Uh, there's actually a fair amount of research that shows that when we read aloud to kids in math, uh, their computational ability, their quantitative
reasoning skills increase, and then again, so much research around just how, uh, vocabulary and communication, um, is improved when kids listen to read alouds.
We also know that, uh, read Aou build kids early language and literacy skills, their phonological awareness or their ability to, um, understand and manipulate the sound structure of our language.
I'm showing a very recent meta-analysis, which is a synthesis of all of these studies showing an effect size, a quite large, um, or quite robust effect size, um, about phonological awareness skills.
And I love showing this image because I wanna just sort of differentiate between what you're seeing with these, uh, brain scans.
Let me be very clear that.
So you're not looking at an individual brain, you are looking at groups of 4-year-old children.
So there's a group of about 40 or 50 kids that their images are all stacked on top of each other.
And these are the kids in blue.
And then there's another group of about 40 or 50, also four year olds.
And what you're seeing is brain scans that are in red.
And when I show these to people and ask them, well, what do you notice?
What's the difference?
Many people often comment the blue, the kids are using more of their brain.
We're seeing more activation, more oxygenated, blood flowing throughout their brain, and we assume that more.
Is better now.
I'm actually pulling from research that came out of the Cincinnati Children's Hospital, a researcher named John Hutton.
Uh, everyday media sources like CNN and USA today picked up on it.
So let me give you the backstory of these two images.
Let's start with these kids in red.
These are four year olds preschoolers who are read to frequently, and typically speaking, the research, uh, defines frequently as like five or more times a week.
What you're seeing here.
Is activation in the portions of the brain that are really largely responsible for language and literacy development.
These are the parts of the brain that lead to academic success and achievement.
And later, as kids get explicit instruction in reading, become what we know as the reading brain.
So just by listening to read alouds, we're seeing brain activation activation that serves as the springboard for later reading skills versus.
Same age of kids preschoolers who are spending up to two hours a day on devices.
And those devices are tablets, gaming systems, all the things.
And what we're seeing here is mass disorganization, chaotic activity.
Under development of those parts that are so specific to language and literacy processes.
So as early as four years old, we can literally see differences in the neural structures of kids who are read to versus kids who are not kind of mind boggling.
We know that, um, read alouds are a huge source of vocabulary.
I love this notion that picture books are a lexical reservoir because of the richness of vocabulary that they provide.
We know that children's literature.
Has more rare words being words that are sophisticated words that kids are unlikely to hear in everyday conversation and just listening
to television that they encounter more of those sophisticated, rare vocabulary words in a picture book than they would hear otherwise.
And the, uh, text that I always use as an example of that is Pizza.
Pizza by William Steig.
Super simple picture book.
I could read it to a 3-year-old.
Here's Pete.
Pete wants to go outside and play.
You can see his baseball glove and ball, but it's raining outside, so he has to do something inside instead.
And his father makes up this indoor activity where they make him into a pizza.
Super fun.
Read aloud for a young kid and look at this one sentence.
Pete's father can't help but noticing how miserable his son is.
The words, noticing the words miserable is a three-year-old likely to hear those words in everyday conversation?
Probably not.
But the picture book gives us a, um, a, a perfect opportunity to introduce those sophisticated vocabulary words.
We also know that there are socio-emotional benefits that when kids listen to read alouds, particularly in narrative text, they have
more developed, uh, conflict resolution skills, more sensitivity, more empathy better self-regulation, less uh, disruptive outbursts.
We know, uh, from this brand new article, a 2025 article that when we read picture books that model some of this emotional literacy, we give kids emotional
vocabulary to express their feelings and use that as a way to, uh, start conflict resolution to, uh, build those life skills and that socio-emotional learning.
We also know that there are physiological benefits of listening to read alouds.
And this science every time I present it, is wild to me.
Let's first start in a neonatal intensive care unit.
The NICU is where our premature babies go, uh, to be, uh, to get medical care until they're medically robust, to be discharged home.
And, uh.
We know this from a study that happened at the University of Virginia.
Um, and if you've not seen a NICU in real life, you've likely seen one on a hospital drama.
You know that babies are in incubators with these wires and these monitors.
And what happened in this reading garden, they took babies and either whisper, read to them because they were tiny, like less than four pounds and very premature, real low birth weight, or they read to them at normal frequency and duration.
And because these babies were hooked up to all of these wires and monitors, they found something that kind of blew their mind.
They found that babies had.
Their heart rates decreased while their oxygen rates increased, not just during the read aloud, but up to 30 minutes to 60 minutes after the read aloud.
So in other words, just from listening to a read aloud, these babies reached medical homeostasis.
And I wanna show a super quick video of this.
A good friend of mine.
Is a grandmother of a baby who was in the NICU and she knew the science, and she would go in and she would do a read aloud to the baby in the nicu, or she would
use something called a Tony Box, which is basically an a modern day version of a Fisher-Price record player where you can have a baby or a child in its crib.
Listen to some sort of read aloud.
Don't worry.
In this super quick video, it's like 40 seconds.
If you can't hear the sound, it doesn't matter.
But what I want you to do is focus in when the camera pans up to the uh, baby Blair's heart monitor and see what happens with the numbers.
Here we go.
-: Olivia looks with her mother, her father, her brother, her dog, Harry and Edwin, the couch.
In the morning after she gets up and moves the cat and brushes her teeth and combs her ears and moves the cat under, Olivia gets dressed.
She has to try on everything.
On sunny days, Olivia like to go the games.
Molly Ness: Wild, right?
You can see the heart rate going down, down to the point where this hospital, the doctors started noticing this and would ask the, my friend, this literacy advocate and colleague.
What, why was she reading aloud?
This baby's too young to understand what's going on, and she showed them the science.
And in this NICU in Texas, this is now the standard of care.
And what you saw, uh, was a Tony Box.
I just screenshot this at, um, when I was down at Target or Kohl's.
You can see them.
Great gifts were coming up on holiday season.
If you have a baby shower to go to, this is a great way to bring literacy into your life because of the importance of those physiological benefits.
We also know that children who are older, these are school age children now that I'm gonna be talking about, who are hospitalized for longer durations of time.
These are kids who are have things like childhood cancer or what have you.
This amazing study focused on what happened to these hospitalized children.
Let me explain the data that you'll see.
So I'm showing you two different sets of data.
We've got a group in blue.
These were kids who listened to stories.
The group in red, these were kids who did not have story time.
Instead, what they had was they did games and riddles and puzzles.
This first row across, what I'm showing you is oxytocin.
Oxytocin is your feel good chemical.
The stuff that, when you get that warm fuzzy feeling because you're snuggling with your dog on the couch after drinking, uh, you know, a pumpkin latte, and you feel that warm fuzzy, that's your oxytocin.
Look how sharply it increases for the blue kids, the storytelling kid.
The next row across is cortisol.
Cortisol is your stress hormone, your kind of fight or flight.
What kicks in to give you the energy burst to out chase to to outrun the tiger that's chasing you.
Look at how sharply the cortisol, the stress hormone decreased for the kids in blue, the storytelling group.
And then the final row across is the pain scale.
If you've been to a hospital or a doctor's office, you've seen this.
This is the series of smiley faces that goes from green.
To red, and the doctor asks you, how is your pain?
And you point to the picture.
That's grimacing.
This is completed by kids themselves.
These hospitalized children evaluated their levels of pain before the read aloud and then after the read aloud and look again, how sharply it decreased for the kids in blue.
So in a nutshell, this environment, which is probably the most anxiety provoking environment you can be in, which is a hospital what we saw, the good stuff increases the oxytocin and the bad stuff.
The pain and the stress decreases just by listening to a read aloud.
Now, if that can be true in a hospital, imagine the power and possibility at home and at school.
So, um, one of the amazing things about rally to read is that we have the opportunity for authors to do these read-alouds to children.
And I'm gonna share some data around what happens when authors read to children.
And I'll first start by the fact that I, as an adult.
And many other people who are literacy advocates and lifelong readers.
We see authors as celebrities and as photographic evidence of this, I'm gonna show you the times that I got to fan girl.
On the right, Jason Reynolds and the lovely woman behind the mask is Judy Bloom.
She has an independent bookstore in Key West Florida.
I went there knowing that she owned this bookstore, um, in January.
I just wanted to go see it.
Uh, her bookstore has, um, is specializes in band books because Judy was one of the first authors really to, to take on, um, book banning.
I did not expect on a Saturday afternoon that she would be, be there literally stacking the shelves herself.
And so I, of course, when I met these authors, what did I do as a reader?
I went back and reread all of the books that they had written because I had this now personal experience, a personal connection to an author, and that's what happens with kids as well.
And as evidence of this, I wanna share some data that comes from this zany creative, just fun-loving family.
What you are looking at is you are looking at.
Author, illustrator, husband and wife, team Robbie Bear and Matthew Swanson, who got the crazy idea to take a bus, not a full-size school bus, one of the
shorter school buses, pack their four children and two dogs into this bus and spend an entire school year driving across the country visiting Title One schools.
They did, they chose Title One schools that don't typically have the funding to bring in authors and illustrators to, um, have conversations with kids about literacy as well as to give out books to these Title one schools.
Yes, they visited Hawaii.
They didn't take the bus to Hawaii, they flew there, and yes, they visited Alaska.
So in, um, conjunction with this.
Busload of books thing, uh, which took place from 2022 to 2023.
They, um, had these assemblies.
They did these book giveaways, and they also collected data about what happens when authors and illustrators visit kids and talk to them about the importance of reading and literacy.
We sort of instinctually know that good things happen, but we didn't really have a ton of data actually showing this.
And you can look into Matthew and Robbie and find out their amazing children's books.
Super fun.
They have a ton of them as well as this crazy busload of book tours.
Again, four children.
Their children, I believe at the time were 10th grade all the way to third grade.
They had this popup kind of tent at the top of the, uh, the bus.
Where, um, the kids slept and they literally were in campgrounds for the entire and driveways of, uh, of very gracious readers for this entire year.
And so what did the data show?
And this is, um, not yet published, uh, but it is going to be published.
So, um, please follow up if you want any of it.
So they asked students about their motivation and how they were using their free time and whether literacy was a part of it before they did this author visit, and these school assemblies and these book giveaways.
And then after reading.
And what they found, not surprisingly, is that students were more motivated to engage in reading and writing activities based on author visits, based on these book giveaways, based on the excitement around these assemblies.
But most importantly.
The students who typically had attitudes about reading that were more positive they had an extra dose of those good sorts of things.
And they found this with both reading and writing, that students who were a part of these visits who got the chance to interact with these authors had higher.
Levels of independent reading, more positive associations with writing and reading just from the author interaction.
And so they were able to take some of what we instinctually know, which is that good things happen when kids interact with authors and really quantify that into some data.
And that's one of the reasons why I am so excited about Rally to read.
You can have, as you go to the website, you'll find things like the author Drew Daywalt reading the actual book that he authored, the
Day Crans, uh, the Crans Made Friends, and there are also a ton of activities in the Rally to Read website that come along with the book.
So this is one of those.
Had this been a thing when I was a parent and needed, you know, 10 minutes to change the laundry or take a shower, I would have my, my daughter at home watch the read aloud.
Maybe I'd join in and then we would watch it again and do some of these interactive activities that are planned both for school applications as well as home applications.
So let's talk then about ways to build reading motivation at home.
It is a question that I'm asked time and time again is how do you get your child to read books?
The number one thing I ask is how often does your child see you read books?
And I don't mean reading on a device or reading on a Kindle, because too often, even though we may be reading.
An app on our phone that's a Kindle app or what have you.
Kids don't naturally associate that with reading.
So I ask parents and caregivers, how often do you, does your child see you reading in hard copy?
A magazine, a newspaper, a cookbook, a beach read, a mystery, whatever you're doing.
Because that's really the best way to get your child to read books.
We know the old adage kids do as they see and not just as they hear so many parents.
This is a hot topic in their minds.
Uh, Scholastic does this lovely survey.
Every year that's representative of families all across the country.
And we're starting to see data that this is an increasing cause for concern for parents that they're wanting kids to read for fun, for independent reading outside of school.
And we see an increase, just a pretty significant increase over four years.
And we know the reasons kids are busy, they're overscheduled, they're rushing off to sports practice or play practice.
Whatever their activity is, social media, phones, all of those things.
And, but we know the value of when kids read just even 20 minutes, how much of a, uh, bang for your literacy buck kids are getting.
So what does that look like?
What do I do in my house?
I'm gonna show you some of the pictures, um, that are just.
You know, I literally snapshotted with my phone, um, because these are ways that I build reading in my home and community.
The first one is in my family room.
We literally have a log.
It's a piece of poster board that tracks what we've read on a yearly basis, and at the end of the year, new Year's day or New Year's Eve.
We look at it, we talk about it.
We set reading goals for next year, and you can see that my daughter back in 2021, she had a real sense of pride of logging all of the titles
that she was reading, and we would talk about the books that she loved and ones that she wished had a sequel and all those sorts of things.
The other photos show the value of finding a cozy spot.
Now, maybe it is.
A good old fashioned tent or a dog bed that you have in a, uh, that you put under the dining room table with a blanket and make a fort.
I came home one day and my child was literally reading in the laundry basket.
I opened the basket to put my work clothes in and out, pop my child reading whatever she was reading, and if that's what it takes to get kids to read.
That's what what we're gonna do.
We also have to push past the notion that these read alouds have to be this post.
Bedtime, I'm sorry, pre-B bedtime activity, meaning yes, there is a value in doing a snugly right before, um, you're winding down for the day.
But that doesn't work for every family and for every caregiver schedule.
I know that when I was a professor, I was teaching until nine o'clock at night.
Did I have the energy to come home and do that?
Read aloud.
Not always.
So we had to find, other times, we did read alouds when my daughter was in the bathtub because she's a captive audience.
We would do read alouds when we were waiting on the sidelines for hockey practice.
Even now, we do these books, each of these books that you're seeing this day in history for kids and an animal a day.
These are super short little passages you can learn about an animal that you've never encountered.
I read it to my daughter, literally as she is unloading the dishwasher and we are putting the lunchboxes together and doing all that stuff in the morning.
And the idea here is that it doesn't have to be.
An activity of 15 minutes start to finish.
These little moments add up and we catch kids when we can, where we can for those read alouds in a way that works for your schedule and their attention.
I walked into a school once and went to the bathroom and on the back of the bathroom stall was this, the toilet papers.
To get the scoop while you poop.
What a great idea.
You are literally a captive audience when you're in that bathroom stall, and you better believe that this school librarian would change these toilet papers.
And what did she see?
You read about that book, who's coming to the library to check out those books?
I just thought this was such a brilliant idea and certainly could be do something, something that we emulate at home.
We also have to make sure that when we talk about independent reading at home.
It is all about this acronym of arc access for a relevance and choice, meaning we can't pass judgment on books that kids wanna read.
When Scholastic surveys kids, the number one and two thing that they wanna read about is books that are funny and books that are gross.
Well, what happens when we say, oh, you can't read that book.
We kill their reading motivation.
So we want to make sure that all kinds of books are always available and that we're quieting the inner critic and not passing judgment.
We also have to make sure that what we don't incentivize reading, uh, that, that we what, let me rephrase that.
That we incentivize reading with literacy activities, meaning when kids read.
We take them to the library and get them a cup of hot chocolate, or they earn more read aloud minutes when they do well on a spelling test or that we have, um, gifts be literacy focused.
So again, we're coming up on holiday season.
Let's give kids magazine subscriptions.
There's a million different kids magazines.
Um, in other words.
These things.
What we know from research is that when we say to kids, okay, if you do your reading, you earn a pizza party or you earn 15 more minutes of movie time or screen time.
What we're unintentionally doing is giving kids the message that reading is something that has to be rewarded.
We have to help kids understand that reading is the in incentive and the reward itself.
And again, just other pictures of not passing judgment on the books that kids want to read.
We may not wanna read the gas we pass, but kids sure do.
In my house, we have book clubs, so we will take a topic.
I'm a huge Bruce Springsteen fan.
If you've seen the movie.
Don't give any, any spoilers.
We're going to see it Thursday night.
But we had a book club where I was reading his memoir.
My daughter was reading the Who Is series and then what do we do?
We had a big old reading celebration where we came together.
We talked about things that we had learned and there's a million different ways that you could do this with, um, something that is coming up in your families.
Have a reading book club.
Based on a topic where you're coming up with different texts that are at different levels and still sharing, um, across, uh, across these different text genres.
We know also that teenagers who read not surprising, better impact on their mental health.
You can see that kids who read are less likely to be anxious or sad or depressed.
So I'm not just talking.
About our early childhood kiddos.
I'm really also talking about our teenagers, our middle schoolers, and our high schoolers, and even our young adults.
Now here is super cool research.
We know that when adults do the read alouds.
We as the caregiver also benefit, and I'm just screenshotting a couple of articles that literally show our mood, our interpersonal
relationship over of, uh, with who we are reading to also improves, decreases in stress, all of those things, so mutually beneficial.
Well, now in our remaining time, let's focus on.
Okay, you've sold me.
I wanna do these readouts.
How am I going to make the most of them so that my kids get as much of that language comprehension as possible?
So I'm gonna walk through maybe five or so different big takeaways.
Summarized here first, we're gonna decla fight the decline at nine, and I'll explain what that means.
Next.
We're going to use our read alouds as a way to think aloud, and I'll show you what that looks like.
We're going to intentionally read to kids that is at, with texts that are above their grade level.
And then, um, for our younger kiddos.
We're gonna talk about something called print salient, or print focused read alouds, and then, um, really intentionally including nonfiction text in our repertoire.
So let's start first with the decline at nine.
So the decline at nine comes from Scholastic data, which shows that when kids hit.
Nine years old, right at about third or fourth grade, we see a significant decline as you see in this graph.
At that read, uh, in read alouds that happen at home and read alouds that happen in school.
And when you probe the data, you find out that parents and teachers assume that kids think the read aloud is too baby-ish, or, oh, they can read on their own.
They don't need me anymore.
So they naturally sort of fade out.
These read alouds.
But what's amazing is when then you look at the other data, which is the kid facing data.
All of the kids say, I wish my parent, I wish my teacher kept reading aloud to me after I was nine years old.
So this is the incentive to fight the decline at nine.
I know this is something that I was conscious of when my daughter was like third or fourth grade, but that's the time to start introducing more sophisticated text.
PIC and, uh, chapter books that introduce conflict and themes that are big and juicy for conversation starters.
So now that you're aware of the tendency to decline at nine, we can intentionally fight against it.
And again, here you see the same data basically explaining why well-intentioned parents.
Stopped those readings at home so that you can really intentionally fight against that trend.
And here we go.
We start to see kids didn't want it.
They wished their parent would continue those read alouds.
So, let me then move to thinking aloud.
So one of the things that we know as we talk about re interactive read alouds, that the majority of language interaction during read alouds is the parent or the caregiver or the teacher.
Asking kids questions, and when we ask kids questions, the intent is often to build their understanding of whatever we're reading.
And we actually know that questioning kids doesn't really improve their comprehension, but what does improve their understanding is something called a think aloud.
Think alouds are super simple to do as a parent or as a classroom teacher.
What you are doing is you are modeling through first person narrative language, the invisible processes that are going on in your head.
The benefits of it are, first of all, you're showing students how to successfully navigate through this text and make meaning of it.
But you're also modeling a reading behavior that students then can take and apply to their reading.
So what does it look like?
So I give kids a heads up.
I give them before the read aloud, Hey, sometimes you're gonna see me when I'm reading.
My finger will be on the side of my head, and when my finger is there, I'm talking about all of the thinking that I'm doing in my head.
If you don't see my finger there, I'm just reading the book.
Well, why do I do this visual cue?
Because otherwise language is just language and kids can't differentiate when the language is, um, from the book itself or when the language is internal thought processes.
So I give kids that visual differentiation.
Well, what does it look like?
You can see that with any of these sentence starters.
You could be ready to do a think aloud with the kid waiting for tonight's bedtime story.
We might say, well, I don't understand, or I'm confused here, or I'm wondering to show how you're asking a question of the text, or Now I understand to show how you're clarifying something, or I'm getting the sense that.
To model an inference.
So all of these sentence starters are ready to go and can be applied widely for any age kid and any content area and what we know.
So we could take something like the Beloved Mo Willem book, Knuffle Bunny, and do an inference model.
An inference.
The author's giving me a clue.
About where this book takes place.
It tells me down the block, which lets me know she lives in the city.
We're showing kids how we're making an inference.
So that they're better gonna understand not just this portion of Knuffle Bunny, but how to make inferences when it's their turn to do the reading.
And you'll have to sort of take my word for it or follow up to get the, uh, research.
But what we know is that think alouds are highly, highly impactful and beneficial, and they're even ready to go in some of the rally to read resources.
If you go to how to Catch a Turkey.
We're heading into Thanksgiving season, so I will, I'm, uh, this is will likely be a popular read aloud.
Well, you can see that thought bubble riff has planned the think aloud for you.
It is ready to go, so take advantage of those resources as well.
The next point I wanna make is that we should be reading aloud to students at text that is above their age level or their grade level, and here's why.
We know that kids listening comprehension what they can understand when they are listening to somebody else.
Read the text, either you a teacher or an audiobook that they can understand at a high, higher level than what they are able to understand when they are doing the reading.
We actually know from longstanding research.
That our reading comprehension and our listening comprehension don't actually align until kids are in like seventh or eighth grade.
So what you're seeing here is along the X axis, the horizontal axis, or kids' ages.
The blue is what kids can understand when they are listening to a text.
The red is what they understand when they are doing the word identification, when they're doing the reading themselves, and look at the big gap between the two.
So let's take age eight, right around third grade.
We can be reading to kids who are eight years old at books that are for fourth graders, or fifth graders or sixth graders.
And because we're doing the hard work of lifting up the words off the page, kids can get to the understanding because their listening comprehension is higher.
Then they're reading comprehension.
Well, what are the benefits of that?
We're exposing kids to vocabulary and language structure and background knowledge that they couldn't access in the text that they are independently reading.
So we intentionally have to read aloud to books that are above kids' age level or grade level.
Now, another big takeaway.
This is focused more towards our littles, our three year olds, our four year olds, our five year olds, is to do what we call print focused read alouds, or sale or print, uh, centric read alouds in which we intentionally draw kids attention.
To the words on the page.
We know from eye tracking software that kids, when they are listening to a read aloud, what do their eyes go towards?
The print, the illustration and what we want to call their attention to is also the words on the page because as we call their attention to the words on the page, we're building their early literacy skills.
So what does that look like?
Super easy to do with our preschoolers, our three-year-olds to about six year olds.
We wanna make sure that we're choosing books that have lots of stuff going on with the words on the page, where there's different fonts, where the print goes in different colors and typographies and directions.
So.
This picture book.
Well, why do you think the author wrote help?
Three times in Red?
We can call kids attention to the exclamation points.
We can call kids attention to this the words in the illustration.
So here we see.
The label of laundromat, I can call kids' attention to it.
Oh, I see a sign that sign reads laundromat.
That lets me know that this is a place that they are going to do their laundry.
We might draw in the beloved elephant and piggy books.
These speech bubbles let us know who is talking when Elephant is talking or when Gerald's talking, it's gray, and when Piggy is talking, it's pink.
We have exclamation points, we have capital letters.
All of these different formats and font features, kids don't naturally pick up on themselves.
So what do we have to do?
Call their attention to it, and I'll give you a second to take a look at some of the things that we could simply integrate with our read alouds.
We could draw their attention to.
These letters are darker.
I wonder why they did that.
The jar says cookies on it.
It lets me know that this jar holds cookies for my really young children.
I might just simply model.
How to handle a book.
I read top to bottom, left to right at the end of a line.
I sweep my finger across.
As kids get to be older, I might invite them in.
Can you show me a capital letter?
Can you help me count the letters?
In this word?
Can you find a letter that's like the letter that your name starts with?
Again, we know that kids don't focus on the print.
Their eyes naturally gravitate towards the illustrations.
And when we do these print focused read alouds, we build their early language skills and some of the books that are in the rally to read have awesome print focused, read aloud opportunities.
I just screenshot that same book the day the Crayons came home.
We can see hello from the rug, different typography, cursive print.
We can see an image of a postcard, so we could talk to kids about, oh, this is where the address goes.
Here's how I read this.
I see some words in capital letters.
Help me find a question mark.
All those sorts of things, drawing their explicit attention to it.
The last tip I want.
To share is to intentionally include nonfiction texts or read alouds at home and at school.
Why?
Because we don't naturally gravitate towards nonfiction and informational text, both at home and at school.
So this 2023 survey looks at pre-kindergarten teachers and what they were reading aloud to kids.
And what you can see is just a tiny portion of them were nonfiction books.
I don't think I included the statistic.
Oh, here I did.
Parents don't typically read informational text or nonfiction texts.
It isn't always a snugly and you know, the warm, fuzzy bedtime experience to read a book about the water cycle or a biography.
But here's the catch.
Kids in K through five spend about half of their day reading nonfiction and informational texts.
But we're setting them up for a challenge.
We're not reading nonfiction text at home and in early childhood classrooms, we're gravitating towards fiction texts.
Well, no wonder kids struggle with nonfiction text, which has different types of vocabulary, different types of structure.
Kids are not getting enough exposure to it, and so we can improve this.
By intentionally including nonfiction texts.
So what would that look like?
Well, we have to treat some of these nonfiction texts as wander around, and by that I mean you don't necessarily have to read that book start to finish.
So what I often would do is I would take a book about zebras and I would say.
I'm gonna go feed the dog.
Here are three sticky notes.
Take a look at the pictures in this book and put three sticky notes on the pages you wanna read together because we can allow kids to help navigate and follow their curiosities as we use these nonfiction texts.
Another thing that I did in my home and classroom, we had a parking lot in my house.
It was literally the inside of the broom closet.
We all know that kids ask a million questions and we don't always know what to do with those questions.
Sometimes they're really great questions.
Sometimes you can just answer and move on.
But what we would do is I would say, that's a great question.
Let me put it in the parking lot.
I'm gonna write it on a sticky note.
Then before it was time for our weekly trip to the public library, we'd go to that parking lot and I'd read the questions that my daughter had asked.
That week, and I would say, all right, let's choose two sticky notes and find the answers to these questions at the library in nonfiction texts.
So for example, one night we were looking at the stars, I. I pointed out the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper, and my daughter asked me, well, where's the medium Dipper?
That's a great question.
It went into our parking lot, and then later that week when it was time for a weekly visit to the public library, or we were going through
the reading as fundamental libraries, we could have said, how about we try to find a book that answers this question super easy to.
Have in terms of home and school and then also shows kids that their questions are valuable.
And that question asking and being curious and inquisitive is a thing that we want to encourage.
And, uh, what's great about the Literacy Central feature in reading is fundamental is that there are so many nonfiction and informational texts that are on there and those resources are ready for you to use.
So, um.
I hope that you are visiting the Literacy Central Hub because there are just so many resources to take advantage of, both in the variety of books, the, um, intentionality of the
resources that are planning for cl for classroom read alouds, as well as home read allows, and then those rally to read videos that are going to be shared from now, I believe until March.
And I know that when.
We create these classrooms and homes, that reading aloud is a part of the fabric of your conversation.
We create environments like this.
This is the bumper sticker that if you were to see me driving in town, this is my bumper sticker.
And then one night I came home from work.
My daughter was six years old.
She had posted this picture on her.
She had posted this sign on her bedroom door.
If you come in when I am reading, get Out.
And I know that we as adults, we've all had days where we just wanna take a book, crawl under the covers, and have the world and every other disturbance get out.
Because this shows how invested kids are.
When we read aloud to them, we help transform them into readers that want nothing more.
Then to be left alone with a good book.
So thank you for the work that you are doing in classrooms and communities and homes where you're creating those environments.
I will share out my contact information for you to, uh, continue to reach out with questions or, um, requests for resources.
Happy to share any of that data, um, and those, uh, research articles with you.
And I will hand it back to Carly.
Karly: Oh, thank you so much, Molly.
This was amazing.
I know folks were really enjoying it.
I even saw a question come in last minute.
So we do have a couple minutes, if you don't mind.
So the question says, uh, what does research and evidence tell us about reading once without a think aloud and engaging students in the think aloud on the second read?
So, at best, during first read, or is there an opinion on this?
Molly Ness: Yeah, so it's a really good question.
A great question.
It's a great question.
We actually, um, I have never seen peer reviewed articles that compare the two, meaning one control group and one treatment group.
I've never seen that.
So all we can say is sort of instinctually based.
And there's some thought about that.
I know, um, a beloved children's author that I often see at conferences believes that the first read aloud should just be a straight read aloud.
We don't teach into it.
We don't stop for read, uh, thinking aloud.
We just do the read aloud.
I also, and I sort of, I, I, when I think about it.
And he sort of refers to it as like, it should just be a gift, it should just be an uninterrupted gift.
And I sort of think about it, well, we're just giving them a gift and not helping them unwrap it.
Because we know that many times teachers and parents don't do those second or third reading readings.
So to assume that that's gonna happen in the second iteration is a big assumption.
So I tend to do them during.
The think aloud.
But what I do in multiple rereads is I include kids as readers more.
So my questioning, my engagement of kids as it's the second or third read aloud will elevate the number of times that they've done the read aloud.
So if it's a second rereading.
I might say, remind me what happened on this page or this page.
You retell me from the pictures, what you remember, and then we can increase that.
So that we're transferring some of that conversation and responsibility to kids as, uh, the, in those multiple rereading, which research supports multiple rereads for many different reasons.
Karly: Awesome.
Yeah, that was a great question and something I was thinking about too, Molly, is I personally love to use multiple reads as an opportunity to teach different levels of vocabulary.
So maybe focusing, you know, for more complex books that have maybe different tiers of vocab, I like to use multiple reads for that.
So Sure.
It feels validating to hear you say those things.
Molly Ness: It's always good as a parent or teacher when you're like, the research says I'm doing something right.
Karly: Yes.
No, a hundred percent.
Aaron and I talk about that all the time.
Well, thank you all so much for joining.
I know this is it might be super late for you where you're calling in, so I really, really appreciate your time and thank you so much for just like, Dr. Ness said for everything you're doing for your students and your community.
Um, and feel free to reach out to us if you need anything.
You'll receive a follow up email with the link to the recording as well as A PDF, uh, certificate and then some links.
To ensure that you have everything you need after this.
So, thank you so much and thanks again Molly.
It was great to see you and I'm sure, we'll, I'm sure we'll chat soon.
Sounds good.
Thank you.
Thanks everyone.
Goodnight.
Bye.