To make sure this post wasn't redundant, I just scanned over every "Summer Vacation"post I've written that was tagged with the "Tales From the Big Desk" label. At first I was relieved when it didn't come up since that meant I had a topic to write about tonight. But almost as quickly I thought, "How is it possible I've kept this blog for nearly SIX YEARS and haven't written a post about read aloud before?!"
Read aloud is one of my favorite things about teaching. I still remember being transfixed by "James and the Giant Peach" when one of my teachers read it to our class, and listening to "Where the Red Fern Grows" with my sisters at home when I was sure I was way too old to have my mother read stories to me. Sadly, I've had to set read aloud aside over the past several years. When I was part of a 5th grade triad and had three separate math classes to teach, the time I normally would have been able to devote to daily read aloud was excised from my schedule, and of all the compromises that had to be made while working so closely with a team of other teachers, it was always the hardest thing for me to give up. I've missed it terribly. There are fewer points of convergence between my life as a teacher and my life as a writer that are more meaningful to me than getting the chance to read stories to my class. Not that I've ever read anything to my class that I've written -- something about doing that would feel too self-serving. But I did offer up one of my dusty old manuscripts as a read aloud choice a few years ago, when my team was looking for a title that could be finished inside of the number of weeks we had left before summer break. It was a good thing I did too, because not only did the paraprofessional who did the reading that year finish it with only days to go, but the reaction from the students was strong enough to convince me to give it another revision pass that summer. A year later it wound up being the manuscript that would ultimately connect me with my agent.
There have been a handful of times over the years when I've heard from former students about books they remembered me reading in class. One such "kid," who was actually in college at the time, wrote me just as the movie version of "The Hobbit" was about to be released, to let me know how excited he was to see the movie after I had read it back in 5th grade. One summer I heard from a parent, who had to tell me that after I had read "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" to my class at the end of the year (right before the release of "Order of the Phoenix"), her son, a lifelong non-reader, had gone back to read every one of the previous Potter novels, and kept on going to discover other books after he finished them. Even just today I got a nice little comment from a former student on Facebook, saying how she remembered reading "Watership Down" every day right before we went to lunch. And it might have been every day -- getting through that book as a read aloud easily takes half of the school year. It starts out slowly for the kids, but by the time we'd be a hundred pages in they'd beg for more and spent all of the time I was reading drawing pictures of their favorite rabbits. I am being totally serious when I say that if hearing "Watership Down" as a read aloud was the only thing any of my former students remembered about being in my 5th grade class, I'd be totally fine with that.
Getting to have read aloud again this year has been one of my highlights of teaching third grade. The kids have had books that were favorites over others ("The One and Only Ivan" is probably #1 on the list so far), but they've been taken in by each one we've read. I'll work to sell them all too, bringing in different voices and accents, pausing to let the class talk about what's happening, and always stopping at the good parts. It's a great thing to see their engagement build as they listen to stories that many of them likely wouldn't have discovered on their own.
And who knows -- with however many years there might be left in my teaching career, I can only hope I'll get at least one more crack at reading "Watership Down" to one of my classes. And even if that opportunity never comes, I'll still enjoy each time a former student tells me how much a book I read meant to them. Because as hard as I try to sell the book as I'm reading, it's the books themselves that make the mark. And if it's my role to be the one who introduces those books?
That will be pretty awesome for a legacy.
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