Facebook Read Alouds

One thing that we all know is that kids need and love to be read to. It doesn't matter what age they are, they love it. Adults also like to be read to. Just look at the popularity of audio books. The evidence is clear. For students it is much more imperative that we read to them everyday. The more words that kids hear, the better their reading development. Kids need to read on their own, listen to stories, and read text with audio support. They need to be immersed in language from birth.

Many kids, for one reason or another, don't have someone at home to read to them. Maybe they don't have someone at home who is confident enough to read to them. Maybe they have no books. There are dozens of reasons why kids don't hear stories.

We decided to try to help. This week, we initiated a weekly (hopefully) event where we have a teacher record a reading of a children's book. We upload this video to our media center Facebook page, facebook.com/lelymediacenter, so that kids can watch and listen to an adult read them a story. Now, this assumes that a child will have the technology at home to get to our page, and also that they have access to our Facebook page. We are working toward that goal by getting all of our Lely families to "Like" our Facebook page.

This idea is an exercise in outreach. We know that schools are community centers and we have to extend out from the physical building to help kids learn. We have to offer some sort of support 24/7 so that kids have access to learning material. Our Facebook Read Alouds represent just one way that we are trying to accomplish our goal. As the year goes on, we will have a nice collection of read alouds for the kids to use. They also get to see some of their favorite teachers reading them a story whenever they want to watch. We hope that this idea sparks the imagination of kids even while they are away from school.

Our first Facebook Read Aloud was done by Megan Lindburg who read her own book, Conrad the Courageous.