One of the many positives of reading aloud is that you can expose your children to books that they would have difficulty understanding if read independently. Until about eighth grade, children can listen and understand at a higher reading level than they can read. Often these advanced books have new vocabulary that your children (or even you) don’t understand.
So, how should you handle those new words when reading aloud?
You may be tempted to stop mid-stream in your reading and explain each and every new word. It may be counter-intuitive, but stopping to discuss each new word will dramatically decrease the comprehension of the story. When a story is chopped up into bits and continually analyzed, the flow of the story is destroyed, and it’s hard to regain it when you resume reading.
This quote by Esme Raji Codell in How to Get Your Child to Love Reading explains yet another downside to studying each and every new vocabulary word, “Don’t overevaluate. The more you formally test and check, the more you kill the affective gain.”
Put plainly, over analysis kills the joy.
More than likely, a new word in each paragraph will not greatly impede your child’s overall comprehension. The context clues help the child have a general grasp of the meaning.
Here are some Dos for dealing with vocabulary words in read alouds
- Do make a note of new words or hard passages to return to.
- Do postpone most vocabulary discussion to the end of the passage or chapter.
- Do stop the story to explain a new word if it is pivotal to the action and/or is repeated multiple times in the chapter.
- Do answer your child’s questions about a new word.
Once you’ve completed reading your passage, you can stop and discuss a few select vocabulary words.
- Read the word in context again, and encourage your children to make an educated guess as to the meaning.
- Use a dictionary to verify the correct meanings if you’re not absolutely sure. (Here you can sneak in some dictionary skills.)
- Do reread the entire sentence or even paragraph with the new word after you’ve defined it.
Overall, you want the study of new vocabulary words to be an interesting complement to reading outloud. Don’t make it a drudgery of defining long lists of words. Instead, make it fun! Choose just a few of the most interesting words to study. And then try to incorporate the new vocabulary words into your lives somehow. How about using a book of index cards to make your own Word of the Day Calendar? See how many times you can appropriately use the word that day. My daughter and I added the words tatterdemalion and hoyden to our vocabularies using this method. I can tell you that we will both never forget these vocabulary words or the books we learned them from (The Sword in the Tree & The Voyage of Patience Goodspeed, in case you’re wondering).
What are your favorite vocabulary words learned from reading aloud? Do you have any unique ways to handle new words in your books?
Jimmie is a former public school teacher turned homeschooling stay-at-home-mom. A sense of humor, faith, and creativity keep her “pressing on” in her unique situation — living and traveling abroad with an only child in a bilingual environment. Visit her blog at Jimmie’s Collage.
As always, Jimmie, you have some wonderful ideas. So far my kids haven’t rolled their eyes or seemed to be disinterested when I explain a term we come across in read-alouds, but my interruption hasn’t been for retention purposes thus far, just clarification. It’s a good thing I wasn’t going for retained vocabulary according to your cited research.
I haven’t been too concerned about their vocabulary building thus far, as they are both very prolific readers and creative writers, however, I love the idea of a word a day on index cards. They would certainly get on board making it the start of each day. Thanks!
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I like your idea for a word calendar. I think that much of our vocabulary base comes from repeated exposure to good books AND people who use more sophisticated word choice.
There is something almost magical about being pulled into a story and I’ve never liked to “pull” them back out unless I’ve got a very good reason. It breaks the moment, the “willing suspension of disbelief” if you will. When I taught school, I’ve pulled books apart like this with my students (and been in classes where others pulled them apart), to the point where they become lifeless, with no soul left to them.
I think a better way to develop vocabulary is Latin/Greek word roots and little tricks like a daily calendar of new words. Little drops in the bucket here and there add up. Also, we should make a point to stretch own vocabularies–we should never grow too old to play with words.
Having said all that, I do sometimes stop to explain or question their knowledge of a word–more in non-fiction than in fiction.
Recently, we read the book Frindle–that book has opened up some good playful discussions about the words around us, how they come into being, how they get into the dictionary, the power of words, etc.
Elizabeth´s last blog ..Pantheism–Creation and the Creator Inseperable?
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Your word of the day calendar is a wonderful idea for vocabulary building. Do you also put the date of your discovery on the back of the index card? It would be fun to look back, say in a year from now to remember when your child learned the new word as well as recalling the story it came from. This is also a good example of a family bonding activity for the two of you, both learning together, what a terrific experience.
An idea I am starting with my eldest granddaughter this year (she is nine) is for her to create her own dictionary of words that she comes across while reading that she’d never heard of before. We write the word down, look up the definition, synonyms and pronunciation then put it on the page that correlates to the word’s beginning first letter. She loves to draw so some of the words she will be able to illustrate as well. This is a work in progress which can be added to continuously. It should be interesting to see this project develop.
I enjoyed reading your post. Thanks for sharing and giving me another idea for vocabulary building.
Christine´s last blog ..Ten Benefits of Reading Aloud to Children
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