Taking Your Read-Alouds From Interactive to Immersive

Reading aloud to children is a staple of elementary school classrooms, and for good reason. Read-alouds are helpful for vocabulary development, fluency building, and comprehension. To amplify the read-aloud experience, many teachers employ interactive strategies that go beyond speaking and listening. They ask students to identify character traits or make predictions based on context clues and inferences. From these engaging activities, students improve their critical thinking; they’re better able to answer questions, make connections, and articulate thoughts about a text.

As a kindergarten teacher myself, I’m a proponent of interactive read-alouds. I recently tried taking them a step further with an immersive read-aloud—a fun and unique exercise where students enthusiastically participate in the story as it unfolds, which allows for more access points and differentiated autonomy.

I stumbled upon the immersive approach while preparing questions for a read-aloud of Julia Donaldson’s The Gruffalo. The book is a rhyming, whimsical tale of a fictional creature named the gruffalo, who encounters several animals in the woods and threatens to eat them, only to be outsmarted by a tiny mouse. It’s an excellent book for predictions, retelling, and identifying character feelings. The Gruffalo makes for a strong reader’s theater exercise, but is too advanced for most kindergartners to read independently. As a compromise of sorts, I decided to have my students actively participate in the story while I read aloud.

It worked well! From The Gruffalo, I learned that the novelty of bringing a story to life—coupled with the possibilities for cross-curricular connections—makes the immersive approach a worthwhile endeavor.

Immersive Read-Aloud Basics and Benefits

To immerse my students in The Gruffalo, I first listed off the book’s characters and asked for volunteers as well as narrators. Once everyone had a part, I provided simple costumes and props and asked students to draw background scenes. The Gruffalo takes place in the woods, so it was easy enough to have students construct wooded scenes without giving the plot away in advance. We hung the wooded pictures around the classroom before I started reading. Then we arranged ourselves around the room.

As I got into the story, I traveled around the classroom, stopping to ask and answer questions while encouraging students to act out the preceding page in front of their woodland backdrops. By the end of the book, students were fully engrossed—they had a new appreciation for the setting and the characters’ feelings. For instance, the child playing the gruffalo loved being able to shout fiercely and talk about why the gruffalo got scared. Other students imagined classroom furniture as trees to hide behind. One girl excitedly asked when we could do this activity again and act out another story.

All of the students breezed through a follow-up writing activity without any issues. I noticed other benefits as well. Students who struggle with oral comprehension and receptive language skills sometimes find regular read-alouds to be challenging—especially the pauses for questions and discussions. But with the immersive components added in, those same students seemed to have an easier time following along during The Gruffalo. They had more participation options: visual, tactile, and kinesthetic. Students who previously struggled with attention and sensory processing had a better time with the immersive format because they were able to move around and engage, rather than sitting and listening.

Immersive Read-Aloud Tips

Teachers interested in elevating their read-alouds might consider incorporating one or all of the following.

Costumes: Give students costumes, or have them make their own costumes, to embody the characters of a chosen book. Costumes don’t have to be fancy—they might entail simple accessories or identifiers such as sentence strip headbands with pictures of characters on them. They can also be more elaborate and include an actual dress-up component. For The Gruffalo, students wore animal ear headbands and taped pictures of the characters to their shirts.

Props: Create prop versions of objects from the story to help those objects come to life. Alternatively, you can pretend that classroom items are the objects themselves. You might consider drawing or printing out pictures; passing out construction paper, pipe cleaners, and other craft supplies; or even using 3D materials like Play-Doh. During The Gruffalo, I distributed tree branches and binoculars.

Setting: Before the immersive read-aloud begins, I recommend rearranging classroom furniture to make the space similar to that of the story. Or, have students draw scenes from the book and then use the drawings to decorate the classroom. If the read-aloud takes place outside or somewhere at a school (like a gym, for instance), consider moving the read-aloud to that space. If the story takes place at night, turn the lights off to re-create a nighttime effect.

Sound effects: To enhance the experience, find background music on YouTube or another platform, or utilize specific sound effects. For The Gruffalo, I found a photo of a forest that I projected on our interactive whiteboard while playing suspenseful music, which created a captivating environment.