Vocabulary in Your Read Aloud Books

Posted by Jimmie | 0 comments

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

1. Do make a note of new words or hard passages to return to.
2. Do postpone most vocabulary discussion to the end of the passage or chapter.
3. 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.
4. 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.

1. Read the word in context again, and encourage your children to make an educated guess as to the meaning.
2. Use a dictionary to verify the correct meanings if you’re not absolutely sure.  (Here you can sneak in some dictionary skills.)
3. 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.