If I meet with elementary school children, I will start right off giving varieties of demands for the voice that the words on the page will ask.
At a certain point I will take a poem that I’ve read very slowly and quietly and compare it to a poem that’s read very forcefully, with a rich, vigorous voice, and I’ll read it with that quiet, slow, concerned voice. The students immediately see that you may be a good reader but the poet is not asking for that voice. I try to demonstrate right off the importance of listening for the sound of the voice in the printed word because then the words are speaking to you. When words are speaking to you, you are actively engaged and then you get meaning. But when you are pronouncing, as many children will be doing, when asked at the end of the sentence, “What have you read?” They’ll say, “What do you mean? I said every word.”
They’ve said every word, but they have not listened. They have not heard the sound of the voice in the printed word. That is my major emphasis wherever I go. Listen for the sound of the voice in the printed word. Now I speak of it to my young ones almost literally. My middle pre-schoolers, when I’ve finished a program with them, they’ll often come up and take the books from which I’ve been reading and put it to their ear to see if they can hear it, because they listened for the sound of the voice in the printed word. But these are little four- and five-year-olds are hearing it literally.
It’s a virtual sense in which we are readers and create as we read. But it is active in every reader. It is one of the most creative things you can do — to read — because you engage the mind when you read. You create the scene, you create the instant, you create the action, everything about it is being created. That’s why I’ve always said a child who at any time of the day sits with a book reading, you don’t have to worry about all the technology of the world today. They can be involved in everything of it but if they will spend any time with a book, engaging the mind actively in that way, creating a world out of those words, you don’t have to worry about them. It’s those who have turned the book aside, who have nothing to do with books anymore, those are the ones we have to work with and try to bring into it.
I always have felt that if I can associate the excitement of the voice with the book that will bring them into becoming readers.