Maximizing Your Read Aloud
How can we intentionally build students’ language, comprehension, and writing skills through the everyday practices already happening in our classrooms? In this interactive 1-hour virtual workshop, participants will explore the academic, social-emotional, and physiological benefits of read-alouds and consider how reading aloud can create meaningful opportunities for students to build background knowledge, develop oral language, engage with complex ideas, and connect with others. Using examples from a variety of classic K–8 texts, we’ll examine how read-alouds can serve as a foundation for purposeful discussion, thinking, and comprehension.
Participants will learn, practice, and process practical strategies they can use immediately. They will engage with discussion protocols that promote academic discourse and oral language development, analyze common text structures, and practice matching text structures with graphic organizers to help students identify and organize key information. We will then connect comprehension and oral language to writing through shared writing and the use of graphic organizers to support students with sentence-level writing. Participants will consider how these strategies can be adapted across grade levels to help students move from listening and talking, to thinking and organizing, to writing and communicating their ideas with greater clarity and confidence.
Audience: K-8 teachers, interventionists, reading specialists, school and district administrators
Length: 1 hour
Presenter/s: Meghan Sanchez
Dates: November 10, 2026
Time: 4 pm
Cost: Free
Outcomes
- Implement discussion protocols to facilitate academic discourse and strengthen students’ oral language development.
- Analyze common text structures and select appropriate graphic organizers to support comprehension and identification of key information.
Teacher Bio
Meghan Sanchez is a Teacher Training Consultant with Chartwell Teaching Institute (CTI), specializing in structured literacy, morphology, and language comprehension. Meghan brings 10+ years of classroom experience and, prior to this role, taught students of all ages, from PreK-4 to high school. She received her Bachelor’s degree from Haverford College and a dual Master’s from Lesley University.
