Ron's Read Alongs

Teachers and parents who read to kids, and make the reading the basis of conversation, will have greater success turning them on to reading, writing, and general learning.

There is all kinds of research supporting this, but I learned it a couple years after I had started my career conducting writing workshops with kids. I was asked to come and work with the fifth graders in a small town in Northern Minnesota. They had four sections, so it was a sizable school. The kids were mostly white with a smattering of Native Americans. They ranged across the socio-economic spectrum

The first day, as a matter of course, I asked the kids what their favorite books were. In three of the classes I got the usual two or three hands volunteering the same couple of books, the ones the teacher had read to the class or assigned for silent reading. Most of the children didn’t show any special interest in the question.

In the fourth class, though, every single hand went up as they started yelling out titles of books. Most of them named their favorite as Where the Red Fern Grows, the book they were doing as a read along at that moment. But Island of the Blue Dolphins, Waiting for Anya, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Giver, The Devil’s Arithmetic, and on and on were named, too.

Their teacher, a wonderful man named Ron Sprafka, stood there grinning proudly. I found out from the children that they planned to do thirty-two books that school year. The class before them had done thirty-one, and they were out to do one better.

And, yes, Ron did teach other subjects—math, social studies, science, etc. “If you do well on this math game,” he would say, “I’ll read you a chapter of [name a book] before lunch.” He read to them with passion and imagination. He talked to them, and listened to them talk, about the content and background of the stories they read, relating it where possible to the other subjects they studied. Reading wasn’t just fun. It set learning in context, whether the conversation was the history of the Holocaust or a discussion of values set off by Tuck Everlasting.

As I stood listening to Ron’s students that first day, I looked around the room. The walls were covered with posters of book covers. Twenty-five or thirty copies of each book were stacked here and there around the room. Here was Avi. There Katherine Patterson. Three or four piles of Gary Paulsen chapter books filled a corner. I was thrilled.

When it came time for these kids to write, they dove into the whole messy process with energy rare even for an eleven-year-old. Year after year for about ten years I visited Ron’s class, and year after year the quality of their writing reflected the love of stories and language Ron infected them with.

This was not just Read Aloud, fantastic all by itself, but Read Along. In Read Along the child does not have to wait for the teacher or parent, but can read ahead, something Ron’s students loved to do. That way, when he read—doing voices and accents and jumping up and down the way he did when excited (which was most of the time), they read the sections a second time, taking even more from the experience.

True, many of the well-to-do and better educated families in town asked that their children be in Ron’s fifth grade class. These were kids who likely would have done well in any class, but there were lots of youngsters from poor families who blossomed under Ron’s special brand of sunshine. I doubt, also, that so many of the students in his classes would have fallen so passionately in love with reading—and finding out about the larger world—if it hadn’t been for his Ron’s Read Alongs.