Rally to Read Webinar

Read Aloud, Reach Every Learner

A 1985 report titled “Becoming a Nation of Readers” called the read-aloud “the single most important activity” to building later literacy success. In this webinar, educators will learn the benefits of reading aloud to children, as well as ways to maximize their potential to build language comprehension. Author and renowned literary advocate, researcher, and expert, Dr. Molly Ness will share data on the benefits of authors reading aloud to children as well as how to connect home and school read-alouds. Educators will also explore ways to read aloud across all ages and content areas.

Dr. Molly Ness is a former classroom teacher, a reading researcher, and a teacher educator. She earned a doctorate in reading education at the University of Virginia, and spent 16 years as an associate professor at Fordham University in New York City. The author of five books, Molly served on the Board of Directors for the International Literacy Association and is a New York state chapter founder of the Reading League. Dr. Ness has extensive experience in reading clinics, consulting with school districts, leading professional development, and advising school systems on research-based reading instruction. She provided literacy leadership for nationally recognized literacy non-profits, as well as major educational publishers.

In 2024, Molly was invited to serve on the New York State Dyslexia Task Force. A frequent speaker and presenter, her happy place is translating the science of reading to schools and teachers. As a tireless literacy advocate, Molly created the End Book Deserts podcast, which brings awareness to the 32 million American children who lack access to books. She is currently writing a forthcoming Scholastic book, helping teachers understand orthographic mapping. In 2024, she founded Dirigo Literacy, a literacy consulting firm supporting schools, districts, and states align with and implement the science of reading.

When she is not reading and writing about reading and writing, Dr. Ness is driving her ice-hockey obsessed teenage daughter to the rink, learning how to fly fish, or hiking with her poorly behaved goldendoodle.

Contact Information:

www.drmollyness.com
www.dirigolit.com
Twitter: @drmollyness
IG: a_reading_mother
Linkedin: /molly-ness-phd-2474b24a

Webinar Transcript:

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: All right, we are going to get started. Hi, everyone. Welcome, thank you so much for joining. We're super excited and glad that you're here for our special Rally to Read 100 webinar, titled Read Aloud, Reach Every Learner.

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: To those of you that have joined us for a webinar before, thank you so much for coming back. And if this is your first one with us, welcome. We have plenty to offer in all of our series, and you can always catch the replay of any of our previous webinars.

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: Along with anything in previous years, on our website. And I'll be sure to share that link in the chat a little bit later as well. So for anyone new, a quick word about us. We Are Reading as Fundamental, the nation's largest children's literacy nonprofit.

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: And Rally to Read, part of RIF, launched 5 years ago to celebrate RIF reaching our 100 millionth child, and to help boost reading motivation during and after the pandemic, both in classrooms and at home.

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: Rally to Read still now runs for 6 months of themed content, and each theme features 2 monthly read-alouds, showcasing diverse, high-quality, and often brand new releases, which is even more exciting.

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: And these free author-led read-alouds with accompanying activities are available from now through March, so we encourage you and your families to visit rallytoread.org each month to explore the new themes and resources.

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: Tonight, I'm super excited. We will be talking about why reading aloud is considered the most single important activity for later literacy success, and how to maximize read-alouds to build children's language comprehension.

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: We'll hear from our amazing guest facilitator as she shares research on the benefits of authors reading aloud and strategies to connect home and school experiences. We'll also get to explore how to use these read alouds effectively across all ages and content areas.

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: So, like I said, our guest facilitator is amazing, so would love to welcome her now, Dr. Molly Ness.

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: Dr. Molly Ness is a former classroom teacher, reading researcher, and long-time teacher educator, with a doctorate in reading education from the University of Virginia. She spent 16 years as an associate professor at Fordham University and is the author of 5 books.

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: A respected literacy leader, she has served on the International Literacy Association's board of directors, helped found the New York chapter of the Reading League, and supported schools, districts, nonprofits, and publishers in implementing research-based reading instruction.

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: In 2024, she joined the New York State Dyslexia Task Force and founded Dorigo Literacy, a consulting firm dedicated to translating the science of reading into classroom practice.

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: On top of all of that, she's also the creator of the End Book Deserts podcast, which advocates for book access for all children, and has also just released another new book with, on orthographic mapping with Scholastic. And while she's not doing all this amazing literacy work, she's cheering on her hockey-loving daughter, learning to fly fish, or hiking with her mischievous

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: Goldendoodle. So, with that, turning it over to you, and thank you, Dr. Molly Ness, for joining us.

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Molly Ness: Well, thank you for having me. I have long known about the work of Reading as Fundamental from my days of classroom teaching, so thrilled to be here and to talk about my favorite topic, which is reading aloud. Where will we go tonight? We'll talk a little bit about the science of it. Some will be familiar, and some will be kind of mind-blowing new stuff, and then we're really going to focus on,

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Molly Ness: what happens when authors are the ones reading to children, as RIF has some amazing resources and opportunities here. And then I'll give lots of ideas about how to make your homes or your classrooms a place in which read-alouds are joyful. Reading aloud is a shared activity for students of all ages and

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Molly Ness: all content areas So let's start with this gorgeous quote 40 years ago. The, first, like, federally funded

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Molly Ness: report specifically about literacy instruction, came out. It was called Becoming a Nation of Readers, released in 1985, and calling Reading Aloud as the single most important activity for building knowledge and literacy success. So we'velong known the value of read alouds.

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Molly Ness: And I'm going to specifically focus on the value of read-alouds for not just students, but also home read-alouds, because the science is affirming in both different capacities. So you'll hear me talk tonight about how read-alouds build language comprehension, and language comprehension is one of those terms that we often throw around without explicitly defining it, so really what it means

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Molly Ness: is your ability to make sense of language, whether that language is heard, or whether it is written on the page. I was in a preschool classroom in Queens, New York, a few weeks ago, and the teacher was trying to tell these preschoolers to hurry up with whatever activity that they were doing so that they could move on to the next thing, and she kept using the expression, telling kids to get on the ball. Let's get on the ball, guys, so we can wrap this up and finish our next

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Molly Ness: And move on to our next activity. And a 4-year-old turned to me and said, what ball is she talking about? I don't see a ball. That's language comprehension, because this student didn't understand the implied or inferred message behind the discourse that was being spoken. So, language comprehension is the unconstrained skills at the top part of a

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Molly Ness: Hollis Scarborough's reading rope, that when I say unconstrained, I mean it's limitless. And because it's limitless.

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Molly Ness: and doesn't have a clear scope and sequence, it can often be sort of overwhelming to teach. There's so many vocabulary words. How do I start? How do I know when I, can end? What comes next?

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Molly Ness: And so those language comprehension skills, as we have conversations about reading instruction, have to be an explicit focus, not just those sort of clearly mapped out scope and sequence components of word recognition or lifting words off the page. So when I talk about read-alouds, we sort of all know what it is, but

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Molly Ness: There's a couple of things that I want to focus on in this definition. First, I'm talking about a read aloud in using it interchangeably as interactive read aloud.

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Molly Ness: Because the key component here is that conversation and that engagement. It's the serve and volley of language. And it's all around high-quality text. And I want to just point out that not… I am not specifically saying high-quality picture books.

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Molly Ness: high-quality children's literature, because text can be so broad and for so many different grade levels. What I love about, Reading as Fundamental, their online resources, is they have read-alouds for nonfiction texts, as well as classic picture books, moving all the way up into older reader support services. So, again, it's high-quality, text, which is inclusive of so many different

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Molly Ness: components.

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Molly Ness: The good news is read alouds are one of our favorite things for kids to listen to. Many of our students, this is the thing that they remember most about their second grade teacher or their fifth grade teacher, that beloved read-aloud, that experience sharing conversation and engagement around a text. So let's dive a little bit into the science of read-alouds. As I cite, some of this research.

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Molly Ness: Please don't hesitate to reach out if you're interested in

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Molly Ness: reading the articles themselves. I'm going to start first by sort of skimming quickly over the research which is likely familiar to you in your parent gut or in your teacher gut. Even if you don't know the citations or the research itself, you'velikely seen this effect when you read aloud to students and children. We know that, read alouds are more likely to lead to students reading themselves. You are more

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Molly Ness: likely to be, identify, or have self-efficacy in your reading ability if you are read to. I saw this as a classroom teacher. I would read a chapter book by Andrew Clements, and my students would gravitate towards the rest of the Andrew Clements books.

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Molly Ness: That were in the classroom library. We know that kids who are read to have better academic achievement. They have better background knowledge about all sorts of content areas, they have better comprehension skills, and they have more robust vocabularies, not just the words that they receive, their receptive vocabularies, but also their expressive vocabularies.

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Molly Ness: the words that they themselves use in writing or speaking. We also know that kids who are read to have better, higher-order critical thinking skills and can deeply engage with the text. When we read aloud to kids, we get, we provide them a model, that then can translate to their independent writing.

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Molly Ness: There's actually a fair amount of research that shows that when we read aloud to kids in math.

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Molly Ness: Their computational ability, their quantitative reasoning skills increase, and then, again, so much research around just how, vocabulary and communication, is improved when kids listen to read aloud.

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Molly Ness: We also know that, read-alouds build kids' early language and literacy skills, their phonological awareness, or their ability to, understand and manipulate the sound structure of our language. I'm showing a very recent meta-analysis, which is the synthesis of all of these studies, showing an effect size, a quite large, or quite robust effect size, about phonological awareness skills.

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Molly Ness: And I love showing this, image, because I want to just sort of differentiate between what you're seeing with these brain scans. Let me be very clear that

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Molly Ness: you're not looking at an individual brain. You are looking at groups of 4-year-old children. So there's a group of about 40 or 50 kids that their images are all stacked on top of each other, and these are the kids in blue. And then there's another group of about 40 or 50 also 4-year-olds, and what you're seeing is brain scans, that are in red.

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Molly Ness: And when I show these to people and ask them, well, what do you notice? What's the difference? Many people often comment, the blue, the kids are using more of their brain. We're seeing more activation, more oxygenated blood flowing throughout their brain, and we assume that more is better. Now, I'm actually pulling from research that came out of the Cincinnati Children's Hospital

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Molly Ness: a researcher named John Hutton.

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Molly Ness: Everyday media sources like CNN and USA Today picked up on it, so let me give you the backstory of these two images.

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Molly Ness: Let's start with these kids in red. These are 4-year-olds, preschoolers who are read to, frequently, and typically speaking, the research defines frequently as, like, 5 or more times a week.

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Molly Ness: What you're seeing here is activation in the portions of the brain that are really largely responsible for language and literacy development. These are the parts of the brain that lead to academic success and achievement, and later, as kids get explicit instruction in reading, become what we know as the reading brain. So just by listening to read-alouds, we're seeing brain activation that serves as

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Molly Ness: It's a springboard for later reading skills.

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Molly Ness: Versus… Same age of kids.

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Molly Ness: preschoolers who are spending up to 2 hours a day on devices. And those devices are tablets, gaming systems, all the things, and what we're seeing here is mass disorganization, chaotic activity, underdevelopment of those parts that are so specific to language and literacy processes. So, as early as 4 years old, we can literally see differences in the neural structures of kids who are

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Molly Ness: read to, versus kids who are not. Kind of mind-boggling.

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Molly Ness: We know that, read-alouds are a huge source of vocabulary. I love this notion that picture books are a lexical reservoir because of the richness of vocabulary that they provide. We know that children's literature

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Molly Ness: has more rare words, being words that are sophisticated, words that kids are unlikely to hear in everyday conversation and just listening to television, that they encounter more of those sophisticated, rare vocabulary words in a picture book than they would hear otherwise.

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Molly Ness: And the, text that I always use as an example of that is Pizza Pizza by William Steig. Super simple picture book. I could read it to a 3-year-old.

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Molly Ness: Here's Pete. Pete wants to go outside and play. You can see his baseball glove and ball, but it's raining outside, so he has to do something inside instead, and his father makes up this indoor activity where they make him into a pizza. Super fun read-aloud for a young kid. And look at this one sentence.

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Molly Ness: Pete's father can't help but noticing how miserable his son is. The words noticing, the words miserable. Is a 3-year-old likely to hear those words in everyday conversation?

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Molly Ness: Probably not, but the picture book gives us a perfect opportunity to introduce those sophisticated vocabulary words.

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Molly Ness: We also know that there are socio-emotional benefits, that when kids listen to read-alouds, particularly in narrative text, they have more developed conflict resolution skills, more sensitivity, more empathy, better self-regulation, less disruptive outbursts.

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Molly Ness: And we know from this brand new article, a 2025 article, that when we read picture books, that model some of this emotional literacy, we give kids emotional vocabulary to express their feelings

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Molly Ness: And use that as a way to, start conflict resolution, to, build those life skills and that socio-emotional learning.

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Molly Ness: We also know that there are physiological benefits of listening to read-alouds, and this science, every time I present it, is wild to me. Let's first start in a neonatal intensive care unit. The NICU is where our premature babies go, to

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Molly Ness: be, to get medical care until they're medically robust, to be discharged home. And,

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Molly Ness: We know this from a study that happened at the University of Virginia, and if you've not seen a NICU in real life, you've likely seen one on a hospital drama, you know that babies are in incubators with these wires and these monitors, and what happened in this reading garden? They took babies.

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Molly Ness: And either whisper read to them, because they were tiny, like less than 4 pounds, and very premature, real low birth weight, or they read to them at normal frequency and duration, and because these babies were hooked up to all of these wires and monitors, they found something that kind of blew their mind.

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Molly Ness: They found that babies had Their heart rates decreased, while their oxygen rates increased.

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Molly Ness: Not just during the read-aloud, but up to 30 minutes to 60 minutes after the read aloud. So, in other words, just from listening to a read aloud, these babies reached medical homeostasis. And I want to show a super quick video of this. A good friend of mine

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Molly Ness: is a grandmother of a baby who was in the NICU, and she knew this science, and she would go in, and she would do a read-aloud to the baby in the NICU, or she would use something called a Tony Box, which is basically a modern-day version of a Fisher-Price record player, where you can have a baby or a child in its crib listen to some sort of read-aloud.

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Molly Ness: Don't worry, in this super quick video, it's like 40 seconds, if you can't hear the sound, it doesn't matter, but what I want you to do is focus in when the camera pans up to the, Baby Blair's heart monitor and see what happens with the numbers. Here we go.

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Molly Ness: Olivia lives with her mother, Her father, her brother, her dog, hearing.

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Molly Ness: And Edwin attacked.

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Molly Ness: In the morning, after she gets up and moves the cap and brushes her teeth, and combs her ears, and moves the caps, Olivia's nose.

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Molly Ness: He has to try on everything.

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Molly Ness: On sunny days, Olivia likes to go over the

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Molly Ness: Wild, right? You can see the heart rate going down, down, down, to the point where this hospital, the doctors, started noticing this, and would ask the… my friend, this literacy advocate and colleague, what… why was she reading aloud? This baby's too young to understand what's going on. And she showed them the science, and in this NICU in Texas, this is now the standard of care.

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Molly Ness: And what you saw, was a Tony Box. I just screenshot this at, when I was down at Target or Kohl's, you can see them. Great gifts, we're coming up on holiday season. If you have a baby shower to go to, this is a great way to bring literacy into your life, because of the importance of those physiological benefits.

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Molly Ness: We also know that children who are older, these are school-age children now that I'm going to be talking about, who are hospitalized for longer durations of time. These are kids who are, have things like childhood cancer, or what have you.

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Molly Ness: This amazing study focused on what happened to these hospitalized children. Let me explain the data that you'll see.

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Molly Ness: So I'm showing you two different sets of data. We've got a group in blue. These were kids who listened to stories.

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Molly Ness: The group in red, these were kids who did not have story time. Instead, what they had was they did games and riddles and puzzles.

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Molly Ness: This first row across, what I'm showing you is oxytocin. Oxytocin is your feel-good chemical. The stuff that when you get that warm, fuzzy feeling because you're snuggling with your dog on the couch after drinking, you know, a pumpkin latte, and you feel that warm, fuzzy, that's your oxytocin. Look how sharply it increases for the blue kids, the storytelling kids.

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Molly Ness: The next row across is cortisol. Cortisol is your stress hormone, your kind of fight or flight, what kicks in to give you the energy burst, to out-chase, to outrun the tiger that's chasing you.

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Molly Ness: Look at how sharply the cortisol, the stress hormone, decreased for the kids in blue, the storytelling group.

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Molly Ness: And then the final row across is the pain scale. If you've been to a hospital or doctor's office, you've seen this. This is the series of smiley faces that goes from green to red, and the doctor asks you, how is your pain? And you point to the picture that's grimacing.

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Molly Ness: This is completed by kids. Kids themselves, these hospitalized children, evaluated their levels of pain before the read aloud, and then after the read aloud, and look again how sharply it decreased for the kids in blue.

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Molly Ness: So, in a nutshell, this environment, which is probably the most anxiety-provoking environment you can be in, which is a hospital.

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Molly Ness: What we saw, the good stuff increases, the oxytocin, and the bad stuff, the pain and the stress decreases just by listening to a read aloud. Now, if that can be true in a hospital, imagine the power and possibility at home and at school.

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Molly Ness: So, one of the amazing things about, Rally to Read is that we have the opportunity for authors to do these read-alouds to children, and I'm going to share some data, around what happens when authors read to children, and I'll first start by the fact that I, as an adult.

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Molly Ness: and many other people who are literacy advocates and lifelong readers, we see authors as celebrities. And as photographic evidence of this, I'm going to show you the times that I got to fangirl. On the right, Jason Reynolds, and the lovely woman behind the mask is Judy Bloom. She has an independent bookstore in Key West, Florida. I went there knowing that she owned this book.

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Molly Ness: bookstore. In January, I just wanted to go see it. Her bookstore has, specializes in banned books, because Judy was one of the first authors, really, to take on, book banning.

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Molly Ness: I did not expect on a Saturday afternoon that she would be there literally stacking the shelves herself, and so I, of course, when I met these authors, what did I do as a reader? I went back and re-read all of the books

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Molly Ness: that they had written, because I had this now personal experience, a personal connection to an author, and that's what happens with kids as well.

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Molly Ness: And as evidence of this, I want to share some data that comes from this zany.

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Molly Ness: creative, just fun-loving family. What you are looking at is you are looking at author, illustrator, husband and wife team.

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Molly Ness: Robbie Baer and Matthew Swanson, who got the crazy idea to take a bus, not a full-size school bus, one of the shorter school buses.

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Molly Ness: pack their 4 children and 2 dogs into this bus, and spend an entire school year driving across the country, visiting Title I schools.

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Molly Ness: They did… they chose Title I schools that don't typically have the funding to bring in authors and illustrators to, have conversations with kids about literacy, as well as to give out books to these Title I schools. Yes, they visited Hawaii, they didn't take the bus to Hawaii, they flew there, and yes, they visited Alaska. So, in conjunction with this.

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Molly Ness: Busload of books thing, which took place from 2022 to 2023.

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Molly Ness: They had these assemblies, they did these book giveaways, and they also collected data about what happens when authors and illustrators visit kids and talk to them about the importance of reading and literacy. We sort of instinctually know that good things happen, but we didn't really have a ton of data actually showing this. And you can look into Matthew.

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Molly Ness: and Robbie, and find out their amazing children's books. They're super fun, they have a ton of them, as well as this crazy busload of book tours. Again, for children. Their children, I believe, at the time were

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Molly Ness: 10th grade all the way to 3rd grade. They had this pop-up, kind of tent at the top of the, the bus.

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Molly Ness: where the kids slept, and they literally were in campgrounds for the entire… and driveways of, of very gracious readers, for this entire year. And so, what did the data show? And this is not yet published, but it is going to be published, so please follow up if you want any of it. So they asked

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Molly Ness: Students about their motivation and how they were using their free time and whether literacy was a part of it.

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Molly Ness: Before they did this author visit, and these school assemblies, and these book giveaways, And then after reading.

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Molly Ness: And what they found, not surprisingly, is that students were more motivated to engage in reading and writing activities based on author visits, based on these book giveaways, based on the excitement around these assemblies, but most importantly.

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Molly Ness: The students who typically had, attitudes about reading that were more positive, they had an extra dose of those good sorts of things. And they found this with both reading

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Molly Ness: and writing, that students who were a part of these visits, who got the chance to interact with these authors, had higher levels of independent reading, more positive associations with writing and reading, just from the author interaction. And so, they were able to take some of what we instinctually know, which is that good things happen when kids interact with authors.

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Molly Ness: and really quantify that into some data. And that's one of the reasons why I'm so excited about Rally to Read. You can have… as you go to the website, you'll find things like the author, Drew Daywalt, reading the actual book that he authored the day The Crayons Made Friends, and there are also a ton of activities

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Molly Ness: in the Rally to Read website that come along with the book. So this is one of those

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Molly Ness: Had this been a thing when I was a parent and needed, you know, 10 minutes to change the laundry or take a shower, I would have my daughter at home watch the read aloud, maybe I'd join in, and then we would watch it again and do some of these interactive activities that are planned both for school applications as well as home applications.

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Molly Ness: So let's talk, then, about ways to build reading motivation at home. It is a question that I am asked time and time again is.

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Molly Ness: How do you get your child to read books? The number one thing I ask is, how often does your child see you read books? And I don't mean reading on a device or reading on a Kindle, because too often, even though we may be reading

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Molly Ness: an app on our phone that's a Kindle app or what have you.

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Molly Ness: Kids don't naturally associate that with reading, so I ask parents and caregivers, how often do you… does your child see you reading in hard copy, a magazine, a newspaper, a cookbook, a beach read, a mystery, whatever you're doing, because that's really the best way to get your child to read books. We know the old adage, kids do as they

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Molly Ness: They see, and not just as they hear.

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Molly Ness: So many parents, this is a hot topic in their minds. Scholastic does this lovely survey.

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Molly Ness: Every year, that's representative of families all across the country, and we're starting to see data that this is an increasing cause for concern for parents, that they're wanting kids to read for fun.

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Molly Ness: For independent reading outside of school, and we see an increase, just a pretty significant increase over 4 years.

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Molly Ness: And we know the reasons. Kids are busy, they're overscheduled, they're rushing off to sports practice, or play practice, or whatever their activity is.

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Molly Ness: social media, phones, all of those things. But we know the value of when kids read just even 20 minutes.

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Molly Ness: how much of a bang for your literacy buck kids are getting. So what does that look like? What do I do in my house? I'm going to show you some of the pictures, that are just

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Molly Ness: You know, I literally snapshotted with my phone, because these are ways that I build reading in my home and community. The first one is, in my family room, we literally have a log, it's a piece of poster board that tracks what we've read on a yearly basis. And at the end of the year, New Year's Day or New Year's Eve, we look at it, we talk about it, we set reading goals for next year.

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Molly Ness: And you can see that my daughter, back in 2021, she had a real sense of pride of logging

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Molly Ness: all of the titles that she was reading, and we would talk about the books that she loved, and ones that she wished had a sequel, and all those sorts of things. The other photos show the value of finding a cozy spot. Now, maybe it is

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Molly Ness: A good old-fashioned tent, or a dog bed that you have in a… that you put under the dining room table with a blanket and make a fort. I came home one day, and my child was literally reading in the laundry basket. I opened the basket to put my work clothes in, and out popped my child, reading whatever she was reading. And if that's what it takes to get kids to read, that's what we're gonna do.

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Molly Ness: We also have to push past the notion that these read-alouds have to be this post

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Molly Ness: bedtime… I'm sorry, pre-bedtime activity. Meaning, yes, there is a value in doing a snugly right before, you're winding down for the day, but that doesn't work for every family and for every caregiver's schedule. I know that when I was a professor, I was teaching until 9 o'clock at night. Did I have the energy to come home and do that read aloud? Not always.

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Molly Ness: So we had to find other times.

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Molly Ness: We did read-alouds when my daughter was in the bathtub, because she's a captive audience. We would do read-alouds when we were waiting on the sidelines for hockey practice. Even now.

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Molly Ness: We do these books. Each of these books that you're seeing this day in history for kids and an animal a day, these are super short little passages. You can learn about an animal that you've never encountered. I read it to my daughter, literally, as she is unloading the dishwasher, and we are putting the lunch boxes together and doing all that stuff in the morning.

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Molly Ness: And the idea here is that it doesn't have to be

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Molly Ness: an activity of 15 minutes start to finish. These little moments add up, and we catch kids when we can, where we can, for those read-alouds in a way that works for your schedule and their attention. I walked into a school once and went to the bathroom, and on the back of the bathroom stall was this, the toilet papers, to get the scoop while you poop.

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Molly Ness: What a great idea! You are literally a captive audience when you're in that bathroom stall, and you better believe that this school librarian would change these toilet papers, and what did she see?

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Molly Ness: You read about that book?

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Molly Ness: who's coming to the library to check out those books? I just thought this was such a brilliant idea, and certainly could do something that we, emulate at home. We also have to make sure that when we talk about independent reading at home.

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Molly Ness: It is all about this

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Molly Ness: acronym of ARC. Access for A, Relevance, and Choice. Meaning, we can't pass judgment on books that kids want to read. When Scholastic surveys kids, the number 1 and 2 thing that they want to read about is books that are funny.

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Molly Ness: And books that are gross.

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Molly Ness: Well, what happens when we say, oh, you can't read that book? We kill their reading motivation. So we want to make sure that all kinds of books are always available, and that we're quieting the inner critic and not passing judgment.

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Molly Ness: We also have to make sure that we don't incentivize reading, that we… let me rephrase that, that we incentivize reading with literacy activities. Meaning, when kids read.

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Molly Ness: We take them to the library and get them a cup of hot chocolate, or they earn more read-aloud minutes when they do well on a spelling test, or that we have, gifts be literacy-focused. So again, we're coming up on holiday season. Let's give kids magazine subscriptions. There's a million different kids' magazines.

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Molly Ness: In other words, these things, what we know from research is that when we say to kids, okay, if you do your reading, you earn a pizza party, or you earn 15 more minutes of movie time or screen time, what we're unintentionally doing is giving kids the message that reading is something that has to be rewarded. We have to help kids understand that reading

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Molly Ness: Is the incentive and the reward itself.

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Molly Ness: And again, just other pictures of not passing judgment on the books that kids want to read. We may not want to read the gas we pass, but kids sure do.

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Molly Ness: In my house, we have book clubs, so we will take a topic, I'm a huge Bruce Springsteen fan.

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Molly Ness: If you've seen the movie, don't give me any spoilers, we're going to see it Thursday night, but we had a book club where I was reading his memoir, my daughter was reading the Who Is series, and then what did we do? We had a big ol' reading celebration, where we came together, we talked about things that we had learned, and there's a million different ways that you could do this with, something

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Molly Ness: that is coming up in your families. Have a reading book club based on a topic where you're coming up with different, texts that are at different levels and still sharing across these different text genres.

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Molly Ness: We know, also, that teenagers who read, not surprising, better impact on their mental health. You can see that kids who read are less likely to be anxious or sad, or depressed, so I'm not just talking

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Molly Ness: about our early childhood kiddos, I'm really also talking about our teenagers, our middle schoolers, and our high schoolers, and even our young adults. Now, here is super cool research. We know that when adults do the read-alouds.

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Molly Ness: We, as the caregiver, also benefit. And I'm just screenshotting a couple of articles that literally show our mood, our interpersonal relationship over… with who we are reading to also improves, decreases in stress, all of those things. So, mutually beneficial. Well, now.

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Molly Ness: In our remaining time, let's focus on

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Molly Ness: okay, you've sold me, I want to do these read-alouds, how am I going to make the most of them so that my kids get as much of that language comprehension as possible? So I'm going to walk through maybe 5 or so different big takeaways.

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Molly Ness: Summarized here. First, we're going to fight the decline at 9, and I'll explain what that means. Next, we're going to use our read alouds as a way to think aloud, and I'll show you what that looks like.

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Molly Ness: We're going to intentionally read to kids that is, with texts that are above their grade level.

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Molly Ness: And then, for our younger kiddos, we're going to talk about something called print-salient or print-focused read-alouds, and then, really intentionally including non-fiction text in our repertoire. So let's start first with the decline at 9.

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Molly Ness: So the decline at 9 comes from scholastic data, which shows that when kids hit 9 years old, right at about 3rd or 4th grade, we see a significant decline, as you see in this graph.

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Molly Ness: At that read… in read-alouds that happen at home.

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Molly Ness: And read alouds that happen in school.

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Molly Ness: And when you probe the data, you find out that parents and teachers assume that kids think the read-aloud is too babyish, or, oh, they can read on their own, they don't need me anymore. So they naturally sort of fade out these read-alouds.

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Molly Ness: But what's amazing is when then you look at the other data, which is the kid-facing data, all of the kids say, I wish my parent, I wish my teacher kept reading aloud to me after I was 9 years old.

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Molly Ness: So this is the incentive to fight the decline at 9. I know this is something that I was conscious of when my daughter was, like, 3rd or 4th grade, but that's the time to start introducing more sophisticated text and chapter books that introduce conflict and themes that are big and juicy for conversation starters.

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Molly Ness: So now that you're aware of the tendency.

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Molly Ness: To decline at 9, we can intentionally fight against it.

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Molly Ness: And again, here you see the same…

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Molly Ness: data, basically explaining why well-intentioned parents stopped those readings at home, so that you can really intentionally fight against that trend. And here we go, we start to see

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Molly Ness: Kids didn't want it, they wished their parent would continue those read-alouds.

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Molly Ness: So,

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Molly Ness: Let me then move to thinking aloud. So, one of the things that we know as we talk about interactive read alouds, that the majority of language interaction during read-alouds is the parent or the caregiver or the teacher asking kids questions.

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Molly Ness: And when we ask kids questions, the intent is often to build their understanding of whatever we're reading.

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Molly Ness: And we actually know that questioning kids doesn't really improve their comprehension, but what does improve their understanding is something called a think-aloud.

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Molly Ness: Think-alouds are super simple to do as a parent or as a classroom teacher. What you're doing is you're modeling, through first-person narrative language, the invisible processes that are going on in your head.

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Molly Ness: The benefits of it are, first of all, you're showing students how to successfully navigate through this text and make meaning of it.

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Molly Ness: But you're also modeling a reading behavior that students then can take and apply to their reading. So, what does it look like? So, I give kids a heads up.

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Molly Ness: I give them, before the read aloud, hey, sometimes you're gonna see me, when I'm reading, my finger will be on the side of my head. And when my finger is there, I'm talking about all of the thinking that I'm doing in my head.

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Molly Ness: If you don't see my finger there.

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Molly Ness: I'm just reading the book. Well, why do I do this visual cue? Because otherwise, language is just language, and kids can't differentiate when the language is, from the book itself, or when the language is internal thought processes.

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Molly Ness: So I give kids that visual differentiation. Well, what does it look like?

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Molly Ness: You can see that with any of these sentence starters, you could be ready to do a think aloud with the…

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Molly Ness: Kid waiting for tonight's bedtime story. We might say, well, I don't understand, or I'm confused here, or I'm wondering, to show how you're asking a question of the text, or now I understand, to show how you're clarifying something.

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Molly Ness: Or, I'm getting the sense that to model an inference. So all of these sentence starters are ready to go and can be applied widely for any age kid and any content area. And what we know, so we could take something like the beloved Mo Willems book, Knuffle Bunny.

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Molly Ness: And…

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Molly Ness: do an inference, model an inference. The author's giving me a clue about where this book takes place. It tells me down the block, which lets me know she lives in the city. We're showing kids how we're making an inference so that they'rebetter gonna understand not just this portion of Knuffle Bunny, but how to make inferences when it's their turn to do the reading.

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Molly Ness: And you'll have to sort of take my word for it, or follow up to get the research, but what we know is that think-alouds are highly, highly impactful and beneficial, and they're even ready to go

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Molly Ness: in some of the Rally to Read resources, if you go to How to Catch a Turkey, we're heading into Thanksgiving season, so I will… this will likely be a popular read aloud. Well, you can see that thought bubble

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Molly Ness: RIF has planned the Think Aloud for you. It is ready to go, so take advantage of those resources as well.

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Molly Ness: The next point I want to make is that we should be reading aloud to students at text that is above their age level or their grade level. And here's why.

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Molly Ness: We know that kids' listening comprehension, what they can understand when they are listening to somebody else read the text, either you, a teacher, or an audiobook.

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Molly Ness: That they can understand at a high… higher level than what they are able to understand when they are doing the reading.

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Molly Ness: We actually know from long-standing research

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Molly Ness: that our reading comprehension and our listening comprehension don't actually align until kids are in, like, 7th or 8th grade. So what you're seeing here is along the x-axis, the horizontal axis, are kids' ages.

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Molly Ness: The blue is what kids can understand when they are listening to a text. The red is what they understand when they are doing the word identification, when they're doing the reading themselves. And look at the big gap between the two. Solet's take age 8, right around 3rd grade.

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Molly Ness: We can be reading to kids who are 8 years old at books that are for 4th graders, or 5th graders, or 6th graders.

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Molly Ness: And because we're doing the hard work of lifting up the words off the page, kids can get to the understanding, because their listening comprehension is higher than their reading comprehension. Well, what are the benefits of that?

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Molly Ness: We're exposing kids to vocabulary.

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Molly Ness: and language structure and background knowledge that they couldn't access in the text that they are independently reading. So we intentionally have to read aloud to books that are above kids' age level or grade level.

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Molly Ness: Now, another big takeaway, this is focused more towards our littles, our 3-year-olds, our 4-year-olds, our 5-year-olds, is to do what we call print-focused read-alouds, or print

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Molly Ness: centric read-alouds, in which we intentionally draw kids' attention to the words on the page. We know from eye-tracking software

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Molly Ness: That, kids, when they are listening to a read aloud, what do their eyes go towards? The print, the illustration.

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Molly Ness: And what we want to call their attention to is also the words on the page, because as we call their attention to the words on the page, we're building their early literacy skills.

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Molly Ness: So, what does that look like? Super easy to do with our preschoolers, our 3-year-olds, to about 6-year-olds.

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Molly Ness: We want to make sure that we're choosing books that have lots of stuff going on with the words on the page, where there's different fonts, where the print goes in different colors and typographies and directions. So.

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Molly Ness: This picture book? Well, why do you think the author wrote, help? Three times? In red, we can call kids' attention to the exclamation points.

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Molly Ness: We can call kids' attention to this, the words in the illustration. So here we see the label of laundromat. I can call kids' attention to it. Oh, I see a sign. That sign reads laundromat. That lets me know that this is a place

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Molly Ness: That they are going to to do their laundry.

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Molly Ness: We might draw in the Beloved Elephant and Piggy books.

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Molly Ness: These speech bubbles let us know who is talking. When Elephant is talking, or when Gerald's talking, it's gray, and when Piggy is talking, it's pink. We have exclamation points, we have capital letters, all of these different formats and font features

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Molly Ness: Kids don't naturally pick up on themselves, so what do we have to do? Call their attention to it.

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Molly Ness: And I'll give you a second to take a look at some of the things that we could simply integrate with our Rita Labs.

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Molly Ness: We could draw their attention to, these letters are darker!

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Molly Ness: I wonder why they did that. The jar says cookies on it, it lets me know that this jar holds cookies. For my really young children, I might just simply model

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Molly Ness: How to handle a book. I read top to bottom, left to right. At the end of a line, I sweep my finger across.

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Molly Ness: As kids get to be older, I might invite them in. Can you show me a capital letter? Can you help me count the letters in this word?

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Molly Ness: Can you find a letter that's like the letter that your name starts with?

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Molly Ness: Again, we know that kids don't focus on the print. Their eyes naturally gravitate towards the illustrations, and when we do these print-focused read-alouds, we build their early language skills. And…

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Molly Ness: Some of the books that are in the rally to read have awesome print-focused read-aloud opportunities. I just screenshot that same book the day the crayons came home. We can see Hello From the Rug, different typography, cursive print.

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Molly Ness: We can see an image of a postcard. So we could talk to kids about, oh, this is where the address goes, here's how I read this, I see some words in capital letters, help me find a question mark, all those sorts of things, drawing their explicit attention to it.

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Molly Ness: The last tip I want To share is to intentionally include nonfiction texts or read-alouds.

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Molly Ness: At home and at school.

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Molly Ness: Why?

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Molly Ness: Because we don't naturally gravitate towards nonfiction and informational text, both at home and at school. So this 2023 survey looks at pre-kindergarten teachers and what they were reading aloud to kids.

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Molly Ness: And what you can see is just a tiny portion of them were non-fiction books.

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Molly Ness: I don't think I included the statistic… oh, here I did.

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Molly Ness: that parents don't typically read informational text or non-fiction texts. It isn't always as snuggly and, you know, the warm, fuzzy bedtime experience to read a book about the water cycle, or…

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Molly Ness: a biography. But here's the catch.

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Molly Ness: Kids in K-5 spend about half of their day reading nonfiction and informational text. But we're setting them up for a challenge.

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Molly Ness: We're not reading nonfiction texts at home, and in early childhood classrooms, we're gravitating towards fiction texts. Well, no wonder kids struggle with nonfiction text, which…

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Molly Ness: It has different types of vocabulary, different types of structure.

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Molly Ness: kids are not getting enough exposure to it, and so we can improve this by intentionally including nonfiction text. So what would that look like?

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Molly Ness: Well, we have to treat some of these nonfiction texts as

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Molly Ness: wander around. And by that, I mean you don't necessarily have to read that book start to finish. So what I often would do is I would take a book about zebras, and I would say.

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Molly Ness: I'm gonna go feed the dog. Here are 3 sticky notes. Take a look at the pictures in this book, and put 3 sticky notes on the pages you want to read together, because we can allow kids to help navigate and follow their curiosities.

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Molly Ness: as we use these non-fiction texts. Another thing that I did in my home and classroom.

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Molly Ness: We had a parking lot. In my house, it was literally the inside of the broom closet.

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Molly Ness: We all know that kids ask a million questions, and we don't always know what to do with those questions. Sometimes they're really great questions, sometimes you can just answer and move on. But what we would do is I would say, that's a great question, let me put it in the parking lot, I'm gonna write it on a sticky note.

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Molly Ness: Then, before it was time for our weekly trip to the public library, we'd go to that parking lot, and I'd read the questions that my daughter had asked.

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Molly Ness: That week. And I would say, alright, let's choose two sticky notes and find the answers to these questions at the library in non-fiction texts.

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Molly Ness: So, for example, one night we were looking at the stars.

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Molly Ness: I pointed out the Big Dipper and the little dipper, and my daughter asked me, well, where's the medium dipper? That's a great question. It went into our parking lot, and then later that week, when it was time for our weekly visit.

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Molly Ness: to the public library, or we were going through the Reading as Fundamental Libraries, we could have said, how about we try to find a book that answers this question?

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Molly Ness: Super easy to have in terms of home and school, and then also shows kids that their questions are valuable, and that question asking and being curious and inquisitive is a thing that we want to encourage. And what's great about the Literacy Central feature in Reading as Fundamental is

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Molly Ness: Is that there are so many nonfiction and informational texts that are on there, and those resources are ready for you to use.

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Molly Ness: So,

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Molly Ness: I hope that you are visiting the Literacy Central Hub, because there are just so many resources to take advantage of, both in the variety of books, the intentionality of the resources that are

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Molly Ness: planning for classroom read-alouds, as well as home read-alouds, and then those Rally to read videos that are going to be shared from now, I believe, until March. And I know that when

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Molly Ness: We create these classrooms and homes that reading aloud is a part of the fabric of your conversation. We create environments like this. This is the bumper sticker that if you were to see me driving in town, this is my bumper sticker. And then one night.

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Molly Ness: I came home from work.

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Molly Ness: My daughter was 6 years old, she had posted this picture on her… she had posted this sign on her bedroom door. If you come in when I am reading, get out. And I know that we, as adults, we've all had days where we just want to

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Molly Ness: Take a book, crawl under the covers, and have the world and every other disturbance get out, because this shows how invested kids are when we read aloud to them. We help transform them into readers that want nothing more than to be left alone with a good book.

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Molly Ness: So thank you for the work that you are doing in classrooms and communities and homes where you're creating those environments. I will share out my contact information for you to,

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Molly Ness: continue to reach out with questions or, requests for resources. Happy to share any of that data, and those, research articles with you, and I will hand it back to Carly.

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: Oh, thank you so much, Molly. This was amazing. I know folks were really enjoying it. I even saw a question come in last minute, so we do have a couple minutes, if you don't mind. So the question says…

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: What does research and evidence tell us about reading once without a think-aloud, and engaging students in the think-aloud on the second read? So, at best during first read, or is there an opinion on this?

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Molly Ness: Yeah, so it's a great question. It's a great question.

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Molly Ness: We actually, I have never seen peer-reviewed articles that compare the two, meaning one control group and one treatment group. I've never seen that, so all we can say is sort of instinctually based. And there's some thought about that. I know,

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Molly Ness: A beloved children's author that I often see at conferences believes that the first read aloud should just be a straight read aloud. We don't teach into it.

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Molly Ness: We don't stop for thinking aloud, we just do the read aloud.

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Molly Ness: I also, and I sort of… when I think about it.

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Molly Ness: And he sort of refers to it as, like, it should just be a gift. It should just be an uninterrupted gift. And I sort of think about it, well, we're just giving them a gift and not helping them unwrap it, because we know that many times, teachers and parents don't do those second or third readings, so to assume that that's going to happen in the second iteration is a big assumption. So I tend to do them during

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Molly Ness: the think aloud, but what I do in multiple re-readings is I include kids as readers more. So my questioning, my engagement of kids as it's the second or third read aloud will elevate the number of times that they've done the read aloud. So if it's a second rereading.

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Molly Ness: I might say, remind me what happened on this page, or this page, you retell me from the pictures what you remember. And then we can increase that, so that we're transferring some of that conversation and responsibility to kids as, the… in those multiple rereadings, which research supports multiple rereadings for many different reasons.

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: Awesome. Yeah, that was a great question, and something I was thinking about too, Molly, is I personally love to use multiple reads as an opportunity to teach different levels of vocabulary, so maybe focusing, you know, for more complex books that have maybe different tiers of vocab, I like to use multiple reads for that, so it feels validating to hear you say those things.

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Molly Ness: It's always good as a parent or a teacher when you're like, the research says I'm doing something right.

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: Yes, no, 100%. Aaron and I talk about that all the time.

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: Well, thank you all so much for joining. I know this is, it might be super late for you where you're calling in, so I really, really appreciate your time, and thank you so much for, just like, Dr. Ness said, for everything you're doing for your students and your community. And feel free to reach out to us if you need anything. You'll receive a follow-up email with the link to the recording, as well as, a PDF certificate, and then some links to

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: Ensure that you have everything you need after this, so…

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: Thank you so much, and thanks again, Molly. It was great to see you, and I'm sure we'll… I'm sure we'll chat soon.

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Molly Ness: Good, thank you.

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: Thanks, everyone, good night.

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