• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

BJU Press Blog

  • Home
  • Shop
    • Shaping Worldview
  • Simplified Homeschool
  • Successful Learning

reading aloud

Read Out for Oral Reading Skills!

July 16, 2019 by Guest Writer

teaching oral reading skills
An important part of teaching your child to read includes developing oral reading skills.

Mrs. Walker, who teaches reading for BJU Press Homeschool, has created more online videos to help demonstrate the value—and fun—of reading out loud! Here they are with a summary to introduce each one. I’d encourage you to watch them all and find out more about the importance of oral reading.

When Is Oral Reading Important?

The blog recently focused on silent reading as a valuable skill. The videos linked there show how silent reading helps your student focus and fully understand what he’s reading. But what about reading things out loud? Why is that important? And when’s the best time to do it?

While silent reading will help your student form his comprehensive skills, oral reading will help develop his communication skills. Reading a piece out loud will help your student take what he’s just learned and communicate that to someone else. It’s been said that the best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else. Having your child read aloud will not only help him communicate, it will also make sure he understands what he’s reading!

Save oral reading until after your student has read at least once silently. That way, he has already had time to engage with and process the material. Then he can work through sharing that information with others.

How Do I Grade Oral Reading?

As your student begins reading aloud, you’ll want to grade and record his reading. Tracking his progress helps you determine what areas he might need a little more help with. BJU Press has provided multiple oral reading assessments to help with this—along with specific things to listen for as your child is reading.

Again, we recommend you let your child read the material silently first. You may even want to ask him a few questions to make sure he fully understands what he’s reading.

When he’s ready, listen for the criteria listed on the rubric. Be sure to rate each item honestly but fairly, and give your child positive comments on the things he does well. Oral reading is a difficult skill that requires speaking, pronouncing, and communicating the author’s meaning. He has to do these things all at the same time, so be sure to work through the reading with your child lovingly and patiently.

Why Is Poetry for the Ears?

Poetry is a form of writing that is well-suited for reading aloud. It’s a creative means of communicating information in a way that’s more memorable, more pleasant to listen to, and potentially simpler to understand. Many familiar songs are poems that express important truths in ways that stick with us and compel us to look at those truths in new and fresh ways.

Even though poetry is not a heavy component of BJU Press curriculum, we include it because we believe it’s important. Your child will likely encounter it regularly as he gets older. Large portions of Scripture are poetry, and we want students to be able to understand it and glean truth from it.

How Do We Perform Dramas at Home?

One more genre that’s meant to be both read and heard is theater! Performing dramas at home is a fun way to teach your student many important skills that he will use for the rest of his life. Public speaking, job interviews, and singing in a choir are all opportunities that doing theater at home will prepare him for.

Theater can also teach your child empathy. As he gets ready to be in a play, he’ll have to learn his lines, create a character, and explore why the character made the decisions he did. Being able to understand a fictional character’s motives will help your student interact with others.

You may also want to have your student go off-script and put things in his own words—which will demonstrate whether your child really understands everything that he’s performing!

We hope these videos have made it clear why reading things out loud is such an important life skill for your student. The more he is able to both understand and communicate what he reads, the more prepared he will be for communicating effectively in whatever positions God is preparing him for.

• • • • •

Matt recently graduated with an MA in communication studies and currently works as a freelance writer. He attributes the wild variety in his current opportunities to the exploration his parents gave him through the homeschooling experience. He enjoys theater, the gym, and choral music and will rarely say no to a cold glass of sweet tea.

Filed Under: Successful Learning Tagged With: grading, oral reading, performing dramas, reading aloud, reading poetry

Adding a Reading Hour to Your Homeschool

January 4, 2018 by Jenna


One of my earliest memories about reading was curling up on the couch with my mom and my two brothers as she read us the first chapter of The Hobbit. For some reason, she never finished reading the book to us. But I was so fascinated with Tolkien’s description of a hobbit hole that I felt I had to learn to read just to find out what happened. At least, that’s what I tell people. This was the first and only reading hour that my family ever did.

Ever since then, I’ve always thought of a family reading hour as one element of an ideal family. So I loved hearing about Dynel, a homeschool mom of ten, and her family’s reading hour.

In her family, everyone gets together every day in their special reading corner, and Dynel reads to them for about an hour. Even her youngest kids join in, and they’ve all learned valuable skills in stillness and attentiveness. During their reading hour, Dynel and her family have worked through many classic works of literature. She finds that reading aloud lets her select or adapt the material she reads. She makes the books either more understandable or addresses inappropriate elements.

If you want to add a reading hour in addition to your normal reading instruction, here are some additional ways you could set it up. Your reading hour should be fun, so if you or your children get frustrated with one approach, try a different setup.

Dad’s Reading Hour

One family I know has their reading hour at night right after dinner. The father is often away for long hours at work. Reading together as a family gives the children a chance to connect with Dad. He gets to learn what makes them laugh, and they get to share some valuable moments of stillness outside of the hustle and bustle of the day. Dads might especially enjoy reading these adventure-focused books aloud.

Reading Aloud

If you want to build your children’s confidence and skill in reading aloud, try taking turns while reading. You can assign a different reader each night or alternate readers from page to page, or even paragraph to paragraph. But experienced readers may get frustrated, and less experienced readers may feel overwhelmed by long passages. Remember that reading hour should be fun. So if it isn’t working for one of your readers, you should drop the activity. Keeping all reading times short lets everyone practice, and it makes sure everyone’s happy. These selections from a variety of genres and reading levels help keep everyone interested. Seasonal Christmas books are also especially good for read aloud reading hours.

Reading Silently 

Not every book should be read aloud. And not everyone has the same amount of interest in the topic of a book. For these kinds of situations, you can spend your reading hour reading separate books silently. After your children finish their books, or at the end of every hour, they can share the highlights and what they learned with their siblings. This would work well for informational books and biographies. If your boys put up a fuss about reading “girl books,” independent reading hours are a perfect time for your daughters to read about excellent female heroines and then explain why the boys should read them too. Even the little ones can get involved with books on their level.

Your family’s reading hour may wind up being somewhere between Dynel’s experience and mine as far as regularity is concerned. Even though I don’t remember my mother ever reading aloud to us again, there were many, many evenings that we spent reading together from then on.

 

This post was updated on 3/14/2018 for the purpose of clarifying terms.

Filed Under: Successful Learning Tagged With: homeschool reading, reading aloud, reading hour

Primary Sidebar

As parents, teachers, or former homeschool students, we are passionate about homeschooling from a biblical worldview. We hope these teaching tips, fun activities, and inspirational stories support you in teaching your children.

Email Signup

Sign up for our homeschool newsletter and receive select blog posts, discounts, and more right to your inbox!

Connect with Us!

                    Instagram     

Read Posts on Specific Subjects

Early Learning
Foreign Language
History
Language Arts
Math
Science

Footer

Disclaimer

The BJU Press blog publishes content by different writers for the purpose of relating to our varied readers. Views and opinions expressed by these writers do not necessarily state or reflect the views of BJU Press or its affiliates. The fact that a link is listed on this blog does not represent or imply that BJU Press endorses its site or contents from the standpoint of ethics, philosophy, theology, or scientific hypotheses. Links are posted on the basis of the information and/or services that the sites offer. If you have comments, suggestions, questions, or find that one of the links no longer works, please contact us.

Pages

  • About BJU Press
  • Conversation Guidelines
  • Terms of Use & Copyright

Archives

© 2025 · BJU Press Homeschool