Sarah Mackenzie (00:12):
You are listening to the Read-Aloud Revival podcast. This is the podcast that helps you make meaningful and lasting connections with your kids through books.
(00:29):
Hello, hello. Welcome back to the Read-Aloud Revival Podcast. Hey, if this is your first time tuning in, welcome. We’re so glad to have you with us. I’m Sarah McKinsey, your host. I’m a mother of six and author of both the Read Aloud Family and Teaching From Rest, a home schooler’s guide to unshakeable peace.
(00:49):
Today on the show, I really want to dive in to how does share books with our kids in a way that leaves them wanting more. In a way that turns them into real voracious readers and creates lifelong bonds within our families. If you’ve listened to this podcast or read my book, The Read Aloud Family, you’re probably already aware of the astonishing power of reading aloud, right? Academically speaking, reading aloud to kids even and especially to kids who can already read for themselves, gives them an increased vocabulary, highly sophisticated language patterns, speeds up and deepens their reading comprehension, and gives them what’s most essential for the rest of their reading life. And that is a love for reading.
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In fact, if you want to make sure your parental time and energy will make the biggest difference and best impact on your kids’ academic life, you need to look no further than the closest bookshelf. When it comes to giving our kids an academic edge, reading aloud is more effective than expensive tutoring or private school education and it’s the number one activity we can do to help our kids succeed in reading throughout their school years. And if that isn’t enough, reading aloud also fosters an incredible amount of empathy in our kids, helping them walk a mile in another person’s shoes and see situations from multiple perspectives.
(02:10):
It also inspires our kids to watch character after character after character, overcome obstacles that seem oftentimes, insurmountable in the moment. And then it does all of these things while bonding us together, creating a family connection that carries our kids long into their future. So yeah, in a nut shell, reading aloud is powerful. Books are powerful and sharing those books together is like jet fuel for our family bonding and our kids’ academic and social and emotional success.
(02:41):
Here’s something to think about. Every child begins their life loving stories. You know, three, four, five year olds, they love books, they love being read to. And as Jim Trelease taught us in his book, The Read Aloud Handbook, kids have a 100% enthusiasm and desire for reading when they start school. But here’s what we know. That number declines steadily beginning in elementary school and then it keeps declining rapidly every year thereafter until by high school age. A typical high school student reads for pleasure about… Are you ready for this? Six minutes per day. And that’s not even super accurate because what that number means is that a few high schoolers read a ton for pleasure and most all the rest of them don’t read at all for pleasure. They only read for school.
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So what’s happening here? You know, we light a fire in our smallest kids, we pull them onto our laps, we read rollicking tales and delightful fables and something changes as they grow, right? Our kids start to get reading assignments. Our kid’s reading starts to get tied very strongly to their schoolwork. You know, read this book and fill out the book report or read that book and read a paragraph or take a quiz or make a project.
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So humor me for a second. Think back on your own reading life as a child. Were the books that you were assigned in school, were those the same books you stayed up late at night reading under the covers with a flashlight past your bedtime? Or when you are done writing the book report or the essay for a book you were assigned to read, did you eagerly start reading the book over? You know, excited to dive back into losing yourself in that story.? Did you call your best friend and talk to her about what happened? Just like it was an episode of your favorite TV show. Did you feel like those assigned books were your life’s companions? Would you say they changed you, informed you and became one of your childhood’s sweetest delights? Or most of the time when you were assigned to books for school were you just relieved to have finished the book?
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See, that’s the thing. The best reading experiences should leave our kids wanting more, not feeling relieved to be finally done reading it. There’s a better way to engage our kids with books and no matter where your kids get their literature classes or where they do their quote unquote school reading, whether it’s in a traditional school or it’s at home or any, you know, different kind of learning situation. The good news is that you get to choose the way your family engages with books at home and today I want to share how to do it in a way that lights a fire in your kids, that feeds their desire for reading and makes them love a book more when they’re done reading it.
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It’s four steps that I want to share with you today. A very flexible four step method, if we want to call it that. Engaging our kids in books in a way that helps them love reading more, grows them closer to their family members and gives them a chance to be changed and transformed by the power of story. This is something I love about these steps that I’m about to outline for you. They don’t take any grand planning or any complicated knowhow or set up. Basically, if you’ve got you, your kid’s and a book, you’re golden. And I want to show you how that works.
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Now in my family’s homeschool, this is basically how we interact with books for school and for pleasure. And I do think that of course, if your kids are in a different school situation and you don’t have the control or ability to shift their experience with all books to be this kind of experience. That’s okay because what you’re doing, what you do have control over it. No matter where your kids go to school, no matter what kind of curriculum you might use with them for reading. You have the opportunity to shape the way your kids interact with books for pleasure. And we’re going to talk about that today.
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You could take notes on these four steps I’m going to outline for you, but you don’t have to. So if you want to keep doing whatever you’re doing, you know, taking a walk and driving the car, folding that laundry and making dinner. Then you can just keep doing that good stuff. I took notes for you that you can just grab. So Take a moment to text the word revival to the number 3-3-7-7-7 and I’ll send you those notes for this episode so you don’t have to worry about it. If you don’t text, go to readaloudrevival.com/136 because this is episode 136 and you’ll find the notes there.
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Okay. Step one, choose your book and read aloud. I bet you had no idea that was coming, right? Okay, so it can be a picture book. It can be a novel. It can be a classic. The key here is to read it aloud or listen to the audio book, either is fine. Now if you think right, choosing the book is the hard part. I didn’t know what to pick. You’re in the right place because of course we have a Read-aloud Revival book list that’s free online that will help you choose. Those lists are separated by seasons, times of year, ages, gender, interests, all kinds of stuff. It’s at readaloudrevival.com.
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So go get our book list if you haven’t gotten it already in that, we’ll take the question out of what on earth should I read aloud with my kids. That will make that an easier choice and in fact, when you grab the notes for this episode by texting revival to 3-3-7-7-7, I’ll include a link to our book lists just so you have it handy.
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Step two is share in experience. Now, here’s what we’re going for with this step: connection. What we want is to solidify the book in our kids’ memories as a delight. So it doesn’t need to be super complicated and I tend to think that shared experiences are usually best when they’re not complicated and I like to choose one of two things, food or an outing.
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Now, let’s talk about food first. I mean, you probably make a lot of food, right? If your humans are like my humans, they want to eat several times a day, every single day and I am just, I’m never too eager to add a bunch of tasks to add my to do list or to yours as a mom of six I just, I already have enough to do on an average day. Thank you very much. I don’t need a whole bunch of extra, right?
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So this whole idea of using food is about transforming something. We’re already doing, dinner, for example. Now, here’s what I mean. You’re already cooking dinner every day, right? Most of us are trying to gather our families to share dinner together because we know that eating dinner together is an important part of family life. So how about we just make dinner a part of our reading experience? Now, I don’t mean reading during dinner. I mean, you can do that unless you have toddlers who insist on being the center of attention every dinner time. Not that mine were ever like that, but I mean, transforming the dinner experience.
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Maybe an example will help. So when we read The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe, we made a dinner of pan fried fish, boiled potatoes, fresh bread, and tea. Just like the prevents each children shared with the beavers on their first evening in Narnia. When we read Kate DiCamillo’s, A Tale of Despereaux. We had soup for dinner because soup plays a central role in the hope and the healing woven all throughout that story. As we were reading that one aloud, we had soup for dinner. When we read Tomie DePaola’s books about Ireland and St Patrick’s Day, we read Patrick, the Patron Saint of Ireland, which is a great picture book biography. Then we read Fin M’coul: the Giant of Knockmany Hill, which is an Irish fable. We had a dinner of corned beef and cabbage and Irish soda bread.
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So okay, the idea is that you already make dinner. You just transform it to correspond with what you’re reading aloud. Not always, right? Just once in awhile. Maybe, in fact, this is a good time to interject that. I don’t mean to say that you should do all the steps. I’m going to outline today every time you read aloud with your kids. Goodness gracious, no. In our home, we do this about once a month. I’ll tell you in a minute how I pick those once a month books and how we do what we call family book club around those, which is these steps. I’ll tell you more about that in a second. But once a month, I can manage to coordinate supper with a book we’re reading, right? It’s sort of surprising how much joy comes from this and it’s way simpler than you think and you’re already making dinner. So it’s not about adding to your to do list. It’s just about transforming something you’re already doing to make it more valuable.
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One of the Read-Aloud Revival premium families I met last year at a conference told me they love doing this. We do it every month with our premium family book club. That’s part of the book club that they love because dinner’s just so ordinary, right? So the dad told me his favorite night of the month to come home from work, is family book club night because he knows they’re going to share a meal that the kids are excited about. They’ll often try foods they wouldn’t normally eat because of it, because it showed up in the book and they’re excited about it. It’s something they all look forward to. The older kids, the younger kids, mom, dad, everybody. So food and doing it as a simple dessert or replacing dinner with something that corresponds with a book you’re reading is a really effective way to do that.
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Another really fun way to share an experience about what you’re reading is to go on an outing. Now this can be a super simple outing like packing up a blanket and your book and reading it aloud at a park or something. But it also can be related to your reading if you’re up to it. I know some families who, when we read Locomotive by Brian Floca, which has this gorgeous Caldecott award-winning picture book about the transcontinental railroad, the first transcontinental railroad. They visited railroad museums, a local railroad museum in their area. I mentioned the idea on a previous of the podcast, the idea of reading Goldfish On Vacation by Sally Lloyd Jones and then visiting a local Koi pond. So it can be something that shows up in your book and then you visited something that kind of corresponds with it in your area.
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I mean outings can be a little harder to squeeze in the schedule than dinner because you’re not going on and outing everyday, but you’re eating everyday, right? And I think they do typically require a bit more planning, but they don’t have to be overwhelming. They can always be simple and you don’t even have to do an outing. It’s just another idea that I think works well.
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The point is sharing an experience, which is step two, is about sealing the experience of reading the book in your child’s memory as a delight, as a warm family memory. You basically want your kids to say, “Hey, is that the fall that we read, The Tale Of Despereaux and I helped you make soup?” Or, “Do you remember when I was younger and we read Locomotive and we visited the railroad museum?” Those are the kinds of memories that our kids remember and it ties the reading of a particular book in your child’s memory with an important part of their childhood. And it’s not that difficult. Really, I’m going to make dinner anyway. So if I’m going to make pan fried fish, boiled potatoes, fresh bread, and they’re going to remember, “Hey, do you remember when we ate the beavers dinner?” I mean that’s something that they’ll remember and so ends up tying the book to your child’s memory with this warm, delightful experience.
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So step one is choose a book and read aloud or listen on audio. And then step two is share an experience. Now let’s talk about step three. Step three is talk about it. Now here’s the good news. Conversations about books don’t need to be that different from any other conversations that we are having with our kids. They can be short, they can be long or shallow or deep. The key with talking to our kids about books is that we want our kids to develop the habit of asking questions as they read. That’s how we raise discerning readers. They need to be in the habit of asking questions as they read and then we want them to be open to talking about the ideas they’re encountering in their books with us.
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So once a month when we’re doing our family book club, we’re reading aloud, we’re sharing an experience and we’re talking about it. We practice this habit of asking questions and talking about books more intentionally. Now, a key here is we don’t want our kids to feel like we’re quizzing them. We want it to be easy going. We want it to be friendly. You know, an invitation into conversation. So imagine if you just finished a book and you loved it. Okay, so you’re reading in bed, you finish the book and with a happy sigh, you set the book on your nightstand and you look over at your spouse and say, “Oh, that was so good.” And then your spouse, they respond by picking up the book and flipping through and they start to quiz you on what happened in the story to make sure you actually read it and understood it. Not exactly an invitation to conversation, right? Let’s not do that to our kids. It doesn’t feel any different to them. Let’s do something better.
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In my book, The Read-aloud Family, I share 10 open ended questions that you can ask about any book to have a wonderful conversation about it. What I love about those questions is they can be used with any book in any age child. But today on the show, I want to give you one. My favorite. The one I tend to use most often so that you can just put this into practice right away. I would challenge you, in fact, today on whatever day you’re listening to this podcast, asking one of your kids this very question about a book that they’ve read recently or you’ve read together. Ask your child who was the most courageous in this story and then when they answer, you want to follow up by asking what the character did that so courageous.
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This is effective for a few reasons. One is that it’s a subjective question. There’s no right or wrong answer and that’s why it’s an invitation into conversation. That’s why it’s very different than picking up the book and flipping through the pages and asking right or wrong questions about what happened. That’s why it feels 100% different than taking a quiz about the book. It gets your child thinking about the story in a different way. Rather than just answering with like what they think that you’re looking for or what the right answer is.
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It also gets your child thinking about virtue. Considering the question of courage, that’s a question they’re going to need to ask themselves their entire life, right? And then in addition to that, it gets them going back to the text, even if they only do it in their mind, to choose an example, you know, to give you. So for example, if you ask your child who was the most courageous in the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe, and your child says, Lucy Pevensie, then you ask them, “Okay, so what was something Lucy did that was especially courageous?” And mentally your child is flipping through scenes from the book to choose from. And they do this with picture books too. A very simple picture book. You know who is the most courageous and Peter Rabbit, The Tale of Peter Rabbit? Or who was the most courageous in the Circus Ship? Or who is the most courageous in Make Way for Ducklings? They’re mentally flipping through the story and the scenes in their mind, which is teaching them to go back to the text.
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So who was the most courageous? Now if you’re a Read-Aloud Revival premium member, you know we have a masterclass in premium all about talking with your kids about books and you can watch that masterclass to get some other ideas. Because I demonstrate several questions. You kind of see this magic in action and you also get some specific questions to ask your kids about every book we choose for our monthly family book club in premium.
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So if you’re a premium member, you want to be sure you’re checking out the family book club guides we put out every month. Those give you suggested questions you can use for these kinds of easy going, important, really fruitful and open ended conversations about books. Who was the most courageous? That’s the question I’m going to challenge all of you listening to ask one of your kids about any book they’re reading today. And then ask them, follow it up by asking “And what’s something that character did that is so courageous?” There’s no right or wrong answers. There’s no way for them to fail at this.
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All right. Step one, you choose a book and you read it aloud or listen to it on audio. Step two, share an experience and step three, talk about it. Now those three steps are key. I think you could do them all yourself at home. Nothing fancy, right? It’s just you, your kids, a book, an experience, and a conversation. That is gold. I promise you this will give your kids a different experience with the book then read this book and take a quiz. Read this book and write an essay. Read this book and write a paragraph or read this book and anything. This is a completely… It’s a paradigm shift. And this is a really effective way to help seal these books in our child’s memory as great delights and so they’ll look back when they’re 20 years down the road and they’ll see The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz and they’ll remember that you guys had a special dinner around it or that you went somewhere that went along with the book or that you had this great rousing conversation over dinner. It’s different way to experience books with your kids. It’s extremely effective and it’s also really fun and really simple.
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Now for the gravy I told you there’s four steps, right? I’m just saying this is really good gravy. This is step four and this is meet the author or illustrator. Now here’s where we have a lot of fun in Read-Aloud Revival premium. You might not be able to pull this off at home on your own unless you have a local bookstore or a library that pulls in a lot of great writers and illustrators to meet locally.
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In premium, we are able to introduce your kids to the very best authors and illustrators today digitally so you can meet them in a live video stream right from your own living room, which is magic. But let me tell you, here is why it matters. Here’s why meeting authors and illustrators makes a difference in your child’s life. When our kids meet the author or the illustrator of a book that they’ve fallen in love with, that they’ve already fallen in love with, it becomes a companion for them on just this whole new level.
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They feel like that person they’ve met is a friend of theirs. I cannot tell you how many people have told me that after our kids have met an author in premium at our author access, the kids will see another book by that author at the library and grab it saying something like, “Oh, I know her.” Or, “Oh look, he wrote another one.” It’s like they get to hear from the author or illustrator about why they did what they did with the words, with the pictures they get, oftentimes, they get a peak behind the curtain at the process of writing or illustrating the very book they’ve been sharing an experience with their family about. That they’ve been talking about around the dinner table.
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I’ll tell you, when I go to homeschool conferences and meet a lot of kids whose parents will say, “Oh, you know, do you recognize Sarah McKenzie?” To their kids. And their kids will look at me for a second, and then their eyes will light up with recognition and they’ll start telling me about the author they got to meet in author access. You know, they’ll say, “Oh my goodness, you’re the one who was on the screen with Kate DiCamillo or Tomie Depaola or Gary Schmidt or Jamie Allen or Andrew Peterson, or Patricia Polacco or whoever it is that they got to meet. That they had also been sharing this book and sharing experience and talking about with their family. It’s magic. It’s magical to meet a hero of yours. It’s magical to meet the person behind that book that you’ve been loving with your family, that you’ve celebrated with food, that you’ve been talking about. Ah, it’s just, it takes things to a different level.
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Now the reason you’ve heard me mention Read-Aloud Revival premium family book club is because these steps, this idea of step one, choose a book and read it aloud. Step two, share an experience. Step three, talk about it. Step four, meet the author, illustrator. That’s the exact framework that we use every month for our premium family book club. And you can actually do those first three steps at home on your own, you know, and then you can just meet authors, illustrators, whenever you can locally, whenever they come to your area. I mean, that’s part of the beauty of this system. If you want to call it a system, I’m not sure I want to call it a system, but you don’t need fancy curriculum. You don’t need a lot of literary prowess. You don’t need to make your kids write paragraphs about what they’re reading or five paragraph essays or do book reports. Please, please can we just relieve all the children of the world from book reports from now on. It would do the world of reading a world of good to just ditch book reports once and for all.
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You don’t even have to be super organized. You don’t have to be high energy to pull this off. I promise. I know I’m not a very convincing person to tell you that, but it’s true. It’s just the best way I know to regularly engage with books in your home that does all those things we talked about at the top of today’s show. That helps your child fall more in love with books. That helps your child think the books he or she reads as some of their lifelong companions to that they want to reread so that they want to remember the reading experiences because they’re treasured and savored. They’re positive experiences. This is how we grow readers. This is a huge difference from how most of our kids engage with reading in school situations, right? Or as assigned books or even just engage with books at all once they’re past about the age of five or six.
(22:39):
So that I feel really, really strongly about this. We have this opportunity to… And the capacity, the ability and the opportunity to help our kids fall in love with reading and become readers for life. It’s going to take a little paradigm shift, but it doesn’t take a lot of money and it doesn’t take a lot of prowess and it doesn’t take a lot of energy or set up. It just takes the presence of mind to know that we need to share the book together. We need to share an experience that seals it in their mind as a wonderful memory. We just talk about it and whenever possible we need to meet the author or illustrator. That transforms everything and if this episode resonates with you and you’re thinking, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. This is how I want to do books with my kids. Then you do actually want to check out, Read-Aloud Revival premium because this is what we do there every month. We do it with picture books. We do it with novels. We do it with our whole families, with kids of all ages, from toddlers to teens.
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Every month we give you a family book club guide that walks you through all four steps with ideas for what to make for those dinners or where you could go on an outing. We give you specific questions you can use to have those friendly, easygoing and rich conversations with your kids. And then of course, we let your kids meet the author or illustrator because every single month the author or illustrator, or sometimes both, of the book we’re reading that month comes to premium and streams live video. So your kids can ask their questions and they get that magical experience I was telling you about from home. Good, right?
(24:01):
So this is a simple set of steps, these four steps. I mean depending on your family setup, where your kids do school, how much time you have, how old they are, what you want to do with this. You could do it a lot. I mean you could do it every week if you want with picture books you’re reading. You could do it once a year if that’s all you could manage.
(24:18):
In fact, let me pause for a second. If you only did this once a year for a handful of years, your kids would have a handful of life changing memories about books. They would go, “Oh my goodness.” 20 years from now, when someone says, “What were your favorite books as a child?” I would be really surprised if they didn’t name some of the books that you did this with because this changes their interaction with books, right? So they’ll have this storehouse of wonderful memories. Even if you only pull it off once a year. Or you can do it like my family does, which is once a month. The idea is the same. The goal is the same. We want to grow readers. We want to raise kids who love reading and do it when they don’t have to, and we want to raise kids who are transformed by the power of story. This is the best way I know how to do that. We have the opportunity and the capacity to help our kids fall in love with reading and become readers for life. And if that’s not good news, I don’t know what is.
(25:19):
Now it’s time for let the kids speak. This is my favorite part of the podcast where kids tell us about their favorite stories that have been read aloud to them.
Hailey (25:32):
Hi, this is Hailey and I’m eight years old and I live in Maryland and my books that I love reading are The Magic Tree House books and The Boxcar Children. I really love them because it’s really fun and explorers and I love explorers.
Cadence (25:52):
Hi my name’s Cadence and I’m five years old. And I live in Maryland and my favorite book to read is the [crosstalk 00:26:03] and the Biscuit books and the [inaudible 00:26:09]. They’re funny and because they’re… like the Biscuit one is where the girl falls into the bath.
Charles (26:21):
Hi, my name is Charles. I am 12 years old. I’m from San Diego, California, but I live in Maryland. My favorite series is a really good horse series called Sonrise stables. If you like horses, you would really like that book. I also love another book called [inaudible 00:26:39] because it’s about five kids who try to save their home.
Aria (26:41):
Hi, I’m Aria [inaudible 00:26:47] and I am from California, but I live in Maryland. My favorite book that we read aloud is Mandy because she’s so creative and she runs a house near the woods and she makes it her own.
Maggie (27:03):
My name is Maggie. I am six. I live in Florida and my favorite is Pancakes, Pancakes, and my mom and dad let me [inaudible 00:27:16] to say The Cock-a-doodle-doo, Cock-a-doodle-doo.
Lauren (27:21):
My Name is Lauren. I live in [inaudible 00:27:24] New York. I am eight years old and my favorite series is A to Z Mysteries. I like it because they solve mysteries.
Owan (27:32):
My name is Owan and [inaudible 00:27:47] My favorite book is Strega Nona and I [inaudible 00:27:48].
Speaker 12 (27:52):
And how old are you?
Owan (27:53):
And I’m four years old.
Speaker 12 (27:56):
Good job.
Sam (27:59):
Hello, my name is Sam and I’m six years old and I live in Macon, Georgia. And my favorite book is Green Eggs and Ham because it has my name in it.
Allen (28:13):
Hi, my name is Allen. I live in Montreal, Canada. And my favorite book is Class Clown. And I am seven years old. And my favorite part of the book is because the class clown is always funny and his name is Leonardo and the author’s name is Robert Munsch.
Speaker 15 (28:29):
And what’s your name?
Joanne (28:32):
Joanne.
Speaker 15 (28:34):
How old are you?
Joanne (28:36):
Four.
Speaker 15 (28:36):
And where do you live?
Joanne (28:36):
Canada.
Speaker 15 (28:36):
What city?
Joanne (28:36):
Montreal.
Speaker 15 (28:40):
And what’s your favorite story to read aloud?
Joanne (28:42):
Little Critter.
Speaker 15 (28:44):
Little Critter by…
Joanne (28:45):
Mercer Mayer.
Speaker 15 (28:46):
Mercer Mayer. And what’s your favorite part?
Joanne (28:49):
The naughty part where was he always, always does naughty things.
Sarah Mackenzie (28:57):
Thank you kids. Man, I love it when you call in and tell me about the books you’re loving.
(29:01):
Hey, thanks for joining me today. I hope that was helpful and I hope you experiment with those four steps in your own family’s reading life. Remember, you don’t need to do these steps with every book. In fact, you shouldn’t do them with every book. But once a month or once in a while, see if this doesn’t transform the way your kids experience and remember a book and see if you can’t replace some otherwise negative book experience with this one. And I would be surprised if it isn’t more effective at making an impact on your child’s life than that book would be otherwise. And you can grab the notes, just text the word revival to the number 3-3-7-7-7 or you can go to the show notes at readalourrevival.com/136 and you can grab those notes.
(29:48):
I’d love it if you shared this episode with a friend who may also want their kids to fall in love with books and have a different kind of childhood memory of reading than the dreaded book report. I was assigned to that book and I hated it, kind of memory because this, I think is powerful. This ability that we have to help shape our children’s wonderful, delightful experiences with reading.
(30:10):
Thanks so much for joining me. I’ll be back in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, go make meaningful and lasting connections with your kids through books.
