This can be especially true for characters who were not necessarily treated kindly throughout history (MLK Jr. is a good example). Even in the face of adversity, they overcame the negativity.

This could be given to a student that is having hard times in his or her life and they could be given a biography to someone who has overcome hardships to inspire them to persevere.

Kids need heroes to look up to and biographies give them a good insight into the people they look up to the most.

The child may also find these stories inspiring, especially when they tell of the people's childhoods

Thankfully, there are more biographies coming out now that are catered to children as young as in second grade.

Another perfect example of teaching a child about something when it's at their peak interest and not forced on them.

What a perfect way to explain it to a child. Telling a child that his uncle is simply a bad person and leaving it at that will likely confuse the child even more.

I concur. Children without these little imaginations in their head are just destined to become robots.

That is too bad, because there is fear among people that some kid's imagination is less now with video games, electronics, etc. Fantasy books could be a great way to stimulate the imagination without their faces stuck in a screen.

This is an interesting study and very encouraging to parents who may be concerned that their kid's head is "in the clouds".

As a parent, I want to make sure my daughter has a vivid imagination, while making sure she can distinguish fact from fiction. Imagination is what gives us so many wonderful childhood memories, and for parents to be worried about imagination can be a bit perplexing. As long as there is a dialogue between parent and child about what is real and what is not, there should be minimal issues.

Depending on the area we could teach in, I think adjusting our fables accordingly would help the kids better connect with their culture, and also help the teacher better connect with the kids. Introducing new material would be a good idea too, to give the kids a better view of the different cultures surrounding them.

I think because our world is so fast paced that children need fables. Fables could be a way to ground kids in important life lessons that can be entertaining as well.

This section is extremely helpful. Some articles only point out the research, but gives no indication to teachers on how to implement it in their own classroom.

As for speaking during read alouds, whenever I did read alouds with a class, I would always ask questions to the class to get feedback. Just reading to them may have them "space out" a bit more.

There could be times where a particularly unruly class can be driven off task by these responses, I have seen it personally. I would imagine it would take a teacher a while to find just the right mixture of having the children interacting with the book in their own way while maintaining the order in their classroom.

Children taking ownership of the stories is such a great concept. Previously, I would have thought this behavior is disruptive but now it's leading me to believe that this is how the students are interacting with the story given to them.

This is a very interesting take on inserting into the story. Previously, I thought this type of behavior would be considered disruptive, but this approach suggests that the students are learning from this type of interaction with the story.

I believe teachers also need to seek out these connections to captivate the students a bit more. Getting to know your students not only allows you to make a better connection to them, it allows you to teach them more effectively. This could also be known as "know your audience"

Having a fluent oral model will possibly make these kids more successful public speakers in the future.

Asking (older) students questions like this really prepares them for rigors that high school and eventually college will present them with. They will also follow along with the book, keeping their own responses in mind and they will be able to see if their response will change or stay the same.

This is interesting...perhaps teachers heard that read aloud was important, but had no clear purpose as to how to implement it into their own classrooms.

One of my favorite things to do is to make connections from stories with real life situations, both with students in the classroom and with my daughter at home. It can create more self awareness, as demonstrated with my daughter in "My Mouth is a Volcano"

While an explicit model may not be necessarily needed, some sort of starting point probably would have been nice. Or perhaps his idea was that teachers should just pick up a book, read and see where it takes them from there.

There is a fourth grade teacher I worked with once who did a read aloud with his class everyday after recess and you could just tell it was the class' favorite part of the day. Normally rowdy boys would actually settle themselves and get lost in the story being told because of the enthusiasm that the teacher showed in his readings.

This is a perfect example of the culture divide that this teacher and this student has. What seems almost like child abuse in this teacher's eyes is seen as completely normal in this 5 year old's eyes.

This is for Katie, Christian, Kelsey and Emma