I am no believer in Fate, but I do pay attention to what the British philosopher David Hume called “constant conjunction”. In this case I have had two instances of “reading aloud” conjoin my path. This I do not ignore.
The first was from a recent episode of the highly recommended Gweek Podcast that featured writer and, more importantly, reader Maggie Tokuda Hall. In the podcast embed below you can skip ahead to 21:32 in the podcast and listen to how she and her husband read books aloud to each other. I read massively to my kids when they were young and I have always admired the stories of the ‘cigar factory lectors’. I had to ask myself, “Why did I stop?”
I don’t really know, but I think over the last two years I have begun to reconsider the power of voice through my collaborations on MOOCs like #clmooc and #rhizo14 and #ccourses especially with Kevin Hodgson, Simon Ensor, Maha Bali, and Susan Watson. Bless their pointy little heads. This realization was underlined by their recent birthday greeting to me. Bowled over.
The other conjunction was this post about World Read Aloud Day. The site tries to get classrooms together for the purpose of…wait for it…reading aloud. Lector friends everywhere is their goal (at least for one day, the first Wednesday in March). There year it falls on March 4. Here is an editable embedded HackPad where I gathered together some resources (if you are interested).
I am always the instrumental dude, so my next step is to figure out how to add this to my class. Perhaps I can
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read aloud for our Google+ Community or
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better yet a relay reading of a “commons” book or
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read aloud at the end of class from some biography or science fiction or poetry read or
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read aloud to each other from something they have valued in their research work or
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read aloud poetry/short story that is apt for their discipline
Below is another editable Hackpad if you want to add some ideas, images, links of your own for using reading aloud in the classroom. Thanks for sharing.