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Voice Lessons

I’m often asked, “What can I do to make my stu­dents bet­ter read­ers and/or writ­ers?” My answer? Take voice lessons.

Reading AloudAny­one who has heard a great singer, speak­er, or preach­er knows the pow­er of voice. It is a unique musi­cal instru­ment, capa­ble of infus­ing text with emo­tion, mean­ing, and clar­i­ty. Tie those gifts to read­ing aloud and you have the most pow­er­ful tool for shar­ing and teach­ing lit­er­a­ture. Take a course in learn­ing how to use your voice—voice lessons. How to pace your­self, stand, breath, artic­u­late, phrase the text. Sim­ple stuff, but pow­er­ful. Teach­ers, hire a voice coach for a three-hour les­son. Your stu­dents will love you even more. Over the years I have heard many a tale of a “favorite teacher.” More often than not, the favorite teacher “read to us aloud.”

To read to students—kindergarten on up—is to instill vocab­u­lary, gram­mar, nar­ra­tive struc­ture, and mean­ing to words. It will make the art of read­ing emo­tion­al. Kids who are con­stant­ly read to will think, speak, and write bet­ter. Those of you deter­mined to score high­er in tests will get bet­ter test results if you read to the kids—every day. Par­ents who read to their kids—everyday–develop great psy­cho­log­i­cal and emo­tion­al bonding.

Choose books that make you laugh, cry, and feel deeply. Your stu­dents will laugh, cry, and feel deeply right along with you—and they will love reading.

4 thoughts on “Voice Lessons”

  1. SOOO true! Read aloud became my favorite teach­ing tool espe­cial­ly as I got bet­ter and bet­ter at it, but I start­ed out ahead because of my the­ater and musi­cal back­ground. My hus­band wants me to record myself read­ing a few of the favorites I have shared with him. My fond­est mem­o­ries from school are the books my 6th grade teacher read to us. I have no rec­ol­lec­tion of oth­er teach­ers except in 1st grade read­ing to us and am pos­i­tive 3, 4, and 5 did not. This was in the 50s. I still remem­ber The Twen­ty One Bal­loons and “The Most Dan­ger­ous Game” and lov­ing it. (I was a meek and mild, nerdy lit­tle girl, too.)
    Kids adore lis­ten­ing to the books and if you make use the book as a teach­ing tool in a good way, it bonds the class­room. We keep refer­ring to “what would XYZ char­ac­ter do or think about this” dur­ing the school year. Thanks for this!!! I hope in the CCLS era teach­ers do not neglect this. I think it is a huge­ly impor­tant piece of great lit­er­a­cy teaching.

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  2. I start­ed using poet­ry in the last 10 years of my teach­ing. Learn­ing poems by heart is some­thing I stum­bled on because the chil­dren showed me they want­ed to do it, loved it and thought it was fun. It was some­thing that had great edu­ca­tion­al ben­e­fits to that I real­ized as I added more each year. You can catch a snip­pet of what it is on youtube search for Janet Poet­ry on Parade. Keep in mind this poet­ry recital clip is only the very end result of a year shar­ing words and ideas and bond­ing with poet­ry in addi­tion to the read alouds. The poet­ry piece does not take much class time and the kids love it. My stu­dents learn over 40 poems by heart in the year with no pres­sure or test or home­work or require­ment to par­tic­i­pate. Then it trans­fers to their writ­ing. It is a immer­sion approach because we do poet­ry from day one, reg­u­lar­ly, though ran­dom­ly, through­out the year. Recit­ing poet­ry aids pub­lic speak­ing and read­ing aloud skills, because you even­tu­al­ly can think about each word, each pause and it is a (gen­er­al­ly) short amount of text. It still amazes me that kids can do this so eas­i­ly. I am try­ing to spread the idea espe­cial­ly in the age of the CCLS.…which in its infan­cy may wor­ry teach­ers because of the test­ing fears.….

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