What is an Interactive Read Aloud?

When I played school as a little girl, picture book read alouds were my favorite thing to do with my pretend class! Of course, it was just me reading to my stuffed animals because I was pretending and I did not know the power of an interactive read aloud. (I was only 5!)

Even as a grown up teacher I find myself reading a book to my class where I am talking at them and not cultivating an interactive experience. We all do this sometimes, but we are missing out on AMAZING teaching and learning experiences!

interactive read aloud

Goal of an Interactive Read Aloud

*to engage students in the story, develop their understanding of the skill being modeled, and practice implementing that reading strategy together*

What does this look like?

  1. During interactive read alouds, you are modeling think alouds. This means that you are verbally saying what students should be thinking as they are reading. You demonstrate how to pause to think about what is happening in the text. You are modeling good reader habits!
  2. The most important part of these think alouds though is modeling thinking through and implementing a reading strategy or skill. You should have a target reading strategy that you are practicing during this read aloud.
  3. Students should have the opportunity to also practice implementing the reading strategy during the read aloud. I use very specific sentence starters as I am modeling and have my students use the same sentence frames when I call on them. The picture below shows examples of the sentence frames I use for each reading strategy. Click the picture to learn more about how I teach this!
teaching reading strategies

I use interactive real alouds during shared reading which is the first 10 – 15 minutes of our reading block. I choose a picture book to be our read aloud for the week and one reading strategy to be our focus. We only read a few pages a day during this time so the text and strategy can last the whole week.

Here is a FREE example lesson plan for this way of teaching shared reading with connections. You will also find a bundle of resources for you to use with all of the reading strategies during your shared reading, small groups, and centers!

I hope that your students love experiencing this special way of learning with you! You can do this with ANY book! Here are my interactive read aloud book recommendations for inferences!