What is an interactive read aloud?
An interactive read aloud is an instructional strategy done whole-class in which the teacher reads aloud a text to the class. What makes it interactive is that the teacher makes intentional pauses for conversation with students about different aspects of the text.
Teacher: Now the black snake is here./Its venom burns the land./Courses through the water,/Making it unfit to drink. What might the author mean by “black snake” here? Turn to your elbow partner and talk about that. [Waits, then asks for a volunteer to share.]
Student: The snake is black because it is the oil from the pipeline contaminating the water, like venom.
Teacher: Thank you, Joe. And what makes you say so?
Student: The snake is illustrated in the shape of a pipeline.
Teacher: And then what broader meaning might this snake have? Is there a snake in your life that is spewing metaphoric venom?
From We Are Water Protectors
Students think and talk about the text to make-meaning. The questions — as specific or broad as the teacher decides– can support students in learning new reading skills, practicing concepts they’ve learned in the past, and/or just warming up students to a closer, guided reading experience. How about for joy.
The book the teacher selects is very intentional for how it relates to other instructional goals and texts in the unit of instruction. For example, the above excerpt is eliciting symbolism, which could lead into the day’s lesson on the canonical text, scaffolding one idea to the next.
Why a picturebook?
“A picturebook is text, illustrations, total design; an item of manufacture and a commercial product; a social, cultural, historic document; and foremost, an experience for a [reader / beholder]. As an art form it hinges on the interdependence of pictures and words, on the simultaneous display of two facing pages, and on the drama of the turning page.” (Bader, B. (1976). American picturebooks from Noah’s Ark to The Beast Within. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company.)
Using picturebooks in the secondary classroom invites this art form into the classroom with a great deal of potential for literary appreciation, which may also inspire a future picturebook author. The literary lessons in craft and concept are quite sophisticated.
Ways to enrich curriculum with picturebooks
- Tap prior and/or build background knowledge: Any time during a unit, you can use a picture book that will offer familiar images, characters, setting, and stories to warm-up students for variations on what they already know. This can also build background knowledge by introducing the above elements.
- Front load or introduce concepts or skills: If there are terms you are going to use in a more complex text, introducing the skills and the language of the skills with a picturebook can scaffold the process.
- Text comparison work: Almost every state has a standard about comparing texts. This is one way you can support students in this comparison work: Students will evaluate points of view and perspectives in more than one grade‐level literary and/or informational text and explain how multiple points of view contribute to the meaning of a work.
- Literary study: Picturebooks can be their own unit to study such as analysis of adaptations or the craft and publication of picturebooks or a study of the evolution of picturebooks.
- Public Speaking-Presentation: Students can do their own interactive read alouds with small groups to demonstrate knowledge of skill and concept
A Classroom Example: Momaday and Lindstrom
N. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain is a memoir that high school students may read in 10th or 11th grade. More likely, students will read the prologue or excerpts from the memoir as part of a longer unit on Native American literature or a study of Indigenous authors. Published in 1969 by this Pulitzer Prize winning author, the prologue is about Momaday’s journey to visit the grave of his grandmother through the landscape of his Kiowa ancestors from their beginning in the Montana area to their resettlement in Rainy Mountain, Oklahoma. In the 3 pages of the prologue, readers are welcomed into Kiowa landscape with shifts from past to present as Momaday remembers Kiowa as proud warriors alongside myths about the sky and stars.
If students have not read much by and about Native American authors, they may not know that references to elders, landscape, and historical events can be told so poetically, that such syntactical rhythm is the embodiment of author perspective, and they may struggle to follow the sequence (i.e., flashbacks) as Native American literature is not and cannot be linear.
Picturebooks are a great way to tap prior or build new knowledge and learning about Native Americans while also offering some common ground or an access point to students who may not have ever read first indigenous persons accounts.
Picturebooks are also a way to frontload some elements of Native American literature so that they can tune into the sophisticated syntax of Momaday’s writing. By elements, I mean imagery and symbolism. You can teach setting, sequence, symbolism, and repetition — for example– through the art of the picturebook as a core text and as part of scaffolding a series of texts.
There are several picturebooks that can serve as a wonderful 10-15 minute interactive read aloud with high school students to set them up for a reading of Momaday’s writing, but I have chosen Carole Lindstrom’s We Are Water Protectors to model my process of planning an interactive picturebook read aloud. Author Carole Lindstrom is Anishinabe/Métis and is a proud member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe Indians. She was born and raised in Nebraska and currently makes her home in Maryland. So, right away, with these two stories, we see representation from indigenous writers who have lived in Montana, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Maryland. This story, however, was published in 2020 in response to the Dakota Access Pipeline protests– a contemporary, more proximate story to the lives of our students. In this story, and Ojibwe girl becomes an activist after learning about the black snake contaminating her community’s water. Like Momaday’s story, the stories of elders warn of the past repeating, and like Momaday, the pronouns of “we” and “our” tell the collective experience alongside the “I” that, with others, can advocate for change. The imagery of water comes up in several ways — from Mother Earth, to the womb, to veins and tears. The song “We stand/With our songs/And our drums./We are still here” repeats throughout the book emphasizing the theme and the need to protect the water for all the “we” as “stewards of the Earth.”
(I thought about Thoreau when I first read this book and how it would be fascinating to compare Thoreau’s use of the I pronoun as he ponders nature alongside this story.)
Almost every state has a standard about comparing texts. This is one way you can support students in this comparison work: Students will evaluate points of view and perspectives in more than one grade‐level literary and/or informational text and explain how multiple points of view contribute to the meaning of a work. The Momaday and Lindstrom texts invite students to evaluate the perspectives and how they contribute to the meaning of the work, such as the time period and place. As a teacher, you could model the comparison with the picturebook and then introduce another text for students to include in this comparison.
Note: There is a new free graphic novel Chilocco Indian School: A Generational Story; it can be downloaded for free at chilocco.library.okstate.edu/graphic-novel. There are also project-based learning modules for the classroom. All three of these texts (and others) are a wonderful text set for a unit on Native American literature to tell the story of, borrowing a line from We Are Water Protectors, “We are still here.”
How to discover picturebooks
You may have a story or text that you already teach every year, so you can search picture books with a similar theme, time period, culture. In this video, I look at a few picture books and think through ideas, imagining possibilities. I did a Google search and then requested some books from my library. I also visited the library to find more. (Caution: You will find yourself on the carpet of the library reading for hours, so why not check out two dozen books and let your students do that in the classroom.)
Deciding what concepts and skills to emphasize
In this video, I share my noticings and inner thoughts as I read. Students may benefit from hearing your inner monologue of making meaning. I do this here to begin to plan what I can teach or what I want to help students pay close attention to. I bet the will notice similar things that I do, so I think I will just ask questions like “what do you notice” or “what might this mean.” The intentional pausing depends on the purpose of the interactive read aloud:
Look to your essential questions: How does society influence our identity and the choices we make? What choices do people make in the face of injustice? What are civil rights and who decides?
Look to your content area standards:
- Students will actively listen and speak clearly using appropriate discussion rules with control of verbal and nonverbal cues.
- Students will evaluate details in literary and non‐fiction/informational texts to connect how genre supports the author’s purpose.
- Students will evaluate the extent to which historical, cultural, and/or global perspectives affect authors’ stylistic and organizational choices in grade‐level literary and informational genres.
- Students will analyze how authors use key literary elements to contribute to meaning and interpret how themes are connected across texts.
- Students will evaluate points of view and perspectives in more than one grade-level literary and/or informational texts and explain how multiple points of view contribute to the meaning of a work
Preparing for the interactive read aloud
In this video, I try to show you how I prepared for the read aloud. I put sticky notes inside the book at places where I wanted to pause to elicit thinking about symbolism (the snake) and imagery (the water) and the role of elders along with questions about the sort of issues students are passionate about. This would be a unit on Native American literature, but I think the essential questions that would allow students personal connection if they are not Native are these: How does society influence our identity and the choices we make? What choices do people make in the face of injustice? What are civil rights and who decides? After reading this picture book, they’d be ready to make some initial responses, and then Momaday’s story would deepen, complicate this question along with other texts in the unit.
Conclusions
You may be having doubts about interactive read alouds with picturebooks in the high school classroom. I wonder what is at the heart of the doubt– not rigorous enough, no time, students wouldn’t take it seriously. I think that, if you try it, you will discover something quite remarkable happening in your classroom, and I’d love to hear all about it.
Thank you for your generosity in sharing such great ideas and in a way that makes them accessible for all teachers, no matter how long we have or haven’t been teaching. I’m sharing this link with my pre-service teachers!