Reading Aloud It Is Important

Looking and searching for a way to get your middle school students into reading, help them expand vocabulary, build listening skills, and expose them to different writing styles. Teachers are missing one important element that may help students and that element is reading aloud. When students reach a certain grade and age this element somehow vanishes in the classroom. Primary teachers do read aloud to students within their classroom. Teachers in our middle school classrooms should be reading books aloud but do not always find time to continue reading to their middle grade students.


Reading aloud to middle school students is so important but it seems to be forgotten. Unfortunately, reading aloud is done less with middle school students who delight in having someone read aloud to them. Let them re-experience the magic of their younger years when a teacher read books to them. It does not matter what subject area or genre, be it picture books, chapter books, short stories, or magazines take the time to read aloud.

Reading aloud means giving back to the middle school students the time to experience adventure, explore and discover faraway places, meet people and cultures. Reading aloud to students helps your students get better at oral reading and you are making a significant, positive, and lasting impression on you them.


A student named Alberto Manguel was told by his principal that he was too old to be read to but did he give up the practice?


“I gave up the practice [of being read to] — partly because being read to gave me enormous pleasure, and by then I was quite ready to believe that anything that gave pleasure was somehow unwholesome. It was not until much later … that the long-lost delight of being read to came back to me.” (From A History of Reading, Viking, 1996, by Alberto Manguel

Importance of Reading Nonfiction

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“Adolescents entering the adult world in the 21st century will read and write more than at any other time in human history. They will need advanced levels of literacy to perform their jobs, run their households, act as citizens, and conduct their personal lives. They will need literacy to cope with the flood of information they will find everywhere they turn. In a complex and sometimes even dangerous world, their ability to read will be crucial.” (IRA, 1999)

Students should be able to use language and vocabulary to read and comprehend text to support learning across all content areas. Reading nonfiction is different from reading fiction books. It is important for students to know that nonfiction books contain facts and information and a necessary skill is knowing how to navigate nonfiction books. The skills needed to navigate nonfiction are knowing the table of contents, index, glossary, diagrams, picture captions, and illustrations. Have students understand an Introduction gives insight into the content or theme, the Preface helps the reader understand why an author has written the book or how the book came to be written, and the Foreword is usually written by someone else who may be an expert about the subject. Examining the table of contents and an index first can aide a student in finding chapters that relate to their topic. Following these steps a student will read only the chapters needed and not the whole book.

Libraries, Books, Computers Now What Do Students Do With Them

How do we keep students interested in learning when using libraries, books, and computers?