3 Steps to Planning an Engaging, Explicit Read-Aloud Lesson

May 20, 2024

When you think about read aloud, you might imagine children lounging comfortably on a rug while a teacher or librarian reads from a picture or chapter book. Story time is one type of read aloud and has a place not only in our hearts but also in our schools.

However, there is another type of a read-aloud lesson, one which has a clear instructional purpose, often referred to as dialogic reading or an interactive read aloud. In this type of read-aloud lesson, teachers carefully select texts matched to instructional goals, purposefully plan how to get students to think strategically about the text, weave in vocabulary and knowledge goals, and model reading strategies.

In my new book Teaching Reading Across the Day, I include a whole chapter on how to plan and deliver engaging, explicit interactive read-aloud lessons. Today I want to share three important planning considerations.

1.   Select the right text.

When choosing a text for a read-aloud lesson I look at and consider many different aspects. First, I select a variety of texts across the year deliberately considering inclusivity and cultural responsiveness each time. I’ll choose texts of different lengths, genres, text types, with a variety of main characters and about a range of topics. I’ll also often choose to read across a collection of texts that are connected, sometimes referred to as “conceptually coherent text sets.” As students become familiar with words and concepts in increasingly complex texts, they create semantic networks, linking information for deeper understanding and better retrieval. (Cervetti et al., 2016: Lupo et al., 2019) 

Of course, I want to make sure any text I use for a read-aloud lesson facilitates teaching knowledge, vocabulary, and reading strategies, and challenges students in ways that promote learning. I also want to be certain that the text is engaging to listen to and allows for frequent pauses as I model and prompt students to think and talk about the text.

2.   Plan to build knowledge and vocabulary.

It’s important that with every lesson we teach we think about opportunities to actively build students’ knowledge. Read-aloud texts provide important opportunities to learn vocabulary through context. So, before I read the text aloud to students, I’ll read it looking for Tier 2 vocabulary words—academic vocabulary that is both critical to understanding the text, and which will be useful to know because it’s likely to show up in other texts. If the text offers context to infer meanings of words, I choose a strategy to teach or model. Or if I know I will need to explain a particular word, I jot a kid-friendly definition on a sticky note and put it on the page.

I also think about knowledge the text assumes and what my students are likely to know. Consider students who have never seen snow, and we are reading a book set in a cold winter landscape. I’ll need to plan how to introduce the concept of snow. How will I support students as they encounter scenarios, information, cultures, etc. that may be novel to them.

3.   Prepare strategies and prompts to support student understanding.

As I plan my read-aloud lesson I consider how might I best respond to students to help them meet the lesson objectives. Some of this I can plan by anticipating where students might struggle and providing them with strategies (step-by-step how-tos that help students actively tackle challenges in a text). I’ll then prompt them to engage during the lesson through turn and talks, or opportunities to stop and jot, sketch, or act out something.

Students learn so much by talking about what they’ve heard. They can practice a variety of skills – listening, summarizing, asking questions, adding to classmates’ ideas, discussing character motivation, exploring cultural differences, etc. I’ll often plan opportunities for students to break into small groups or move into a whole-class discussion to practice conversational skills and deepen their conversation.

While planning lessons, I build in opportunitites to build knowledge and vocabulary building, and provide strategy instruction knowing however that I need to be ready to revise my plan during the lesson to meet students’ needs. With every lesson I’ve ever taught, students surprise me, and  I respond in the moment I adapt, prompt, offer different scaffolds, or speed up or slow down my pacing. More on responsive teaching here.

Whether you teach in the primary or middle level grades, social studies, science, or English language arts, read-aloud lessons are a great way to engage students with text that needs a high level of support and scaffolding.

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Jennifer Serravallo is a New York Times bestselling author, award-winning educator, literacy consultant, frequent invited speaker at state and national conferences, and former member of the Parents Magazine editorial board. Jen is best known for creating books and resources rooted in research that help make responsive, strategic, differentiated literacy instruction possible for all educators. In 2023, Jen launched her podcast To the Classroom: Conversations with Researchers and Educators. For more on read-aloud and other types of reading lessons, including more than 20 full-length classroom videos, complete lesson plans and templates, and tables of strategies and prompts, see Teaching Reading Across the Day.