Teaching Children to Read with KWL Charts

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Ann Kennedy on behalf of Expert Village. We'll be looking at how to teach a child to read using big books and read alouds and in KWL charts. We began this session looking at KWL charts. You don't need to make a chart every time you read to your child but you need to know the concepts. Always ask on a nonfiction book, what do you know about the subject? If you're reading about dinosaurs, what do you know about dinosaurs? They're big. What else do you know? Use the phrase, what else do you know? That helps prompt them. If they say they're real big and you say what else do you know? Nothing else. You could ask the question, do you think all dinosaurs are real big? Anything to get a couple questions, to get a conversation and what they do know so you have an idea of what they know and what they don't know. And before you read, you ask them, we're going to read a book about dinosaurs, what more do you want to know? Well, I wonder how much they weigh, I wonder if they let people ride on them. You will discover all kinds of things about your child. Their imagination, their ways of thinking, based on what they want to know and after you finish the book, make sure you remember these two questions and go back and say well, I guess you were right, most of the dinosaurs were big and you had mentioned, whatever they had mentioned, and what more do you want to know? You had mentioned you wanted to know if people rode on the dinosaurs. We didn't learn that in the book, or do you think we did? Go back to let them know that you were listening to them and their questions and what did you learn from the book? Well I learned that dinosaurs are like the fish and like horses and dogs, they all have different purposes, just like the animals today. Well, what did you learn? What more do you think you want to learn that we can go and find out and it may prompt your child to go to another book, an encyclopedia, anywhere to learn more information. It's information in a fun way of obtaining it."