Teaching Kids to Read by Thinking Aloud

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Ann Kennedy on behalf of Expert Village and I'll be teaching you some steps to teach a child to read. Think alouds. In the last session we showed the importance of prediction questions for your child to kind of wonder or guess or think what the story may be about to motivate interest. This is called a think aloud. Think alouds are really really really important. Try to do at least one, maybe two, during the course of reading a book to your child. The child is going to be watching you think, how you think, how you handle making mistakes, how you decode and figure things out. A child will never learn to think for him or herself, make judgments, learn to decode or teach themselves a subject, no matter what it is, unless they witness how you do it. So example, in this particular page, it says I can read Mississippi with my eyes shut. Now, to think aloud on this, I can say, I can read, hmmm, let me see what that word is, Miss iss ippi, oh, it must be Mississippi. That was the strategy, that simple. Take a moment, question yourself, let the child hear you say huh, I wonder what that word is, let me try sounding it out. You showed them a strategy and a technique and you showed them how to think. You're teaching them all the time without specifically teaching reading. In this case, I can read with my left eye. Okay, wait a minute, oh, okay, I meant my left eye, there it is, it's my left because left and right. You know what left and right means, your child doesn't and he needs to know how to figure out what left and right means. Thinking aloud is one of the most wonderful wonderful strategies to teach your child to love literacy and be a lifetime learner. Think alouds."