Re-imagining Reading Homework Using Audio Recordings

After over eight years of teaching and learning with teenagers, I got the opportunity to teach beginning reading to four- and five-year-olds in 2020.  This has undoubtedly brought me the greatest joy of my teaching career. Additionally, the fact that I was able to teach young children 1-1 instead of in a classroom setting, opened doors I did not know existed and allowed me to apply everything I had learned in a school setting in superior ways. I had the opportunity to refine and redefine everything: curriculum, pedagogy, logistics, assessment, and homework. In this post, I share one such idea that changed my teaching in invaluable ways: asking for audio recordings as homework.   

The duration of my classes with such young children is never more than 15-20 minutes, especially if the class is online. Even when the classes are longer, there is usually a need for additional reading practice outside of the context of my class. I began to send a text to the parent, asking them to audio-record the child’s reading of the text and send it to me on WhatsApp. The recordings were 4-5 minutes long at maximum and gave me insights into the child’s reading like no other homework could have. 

I had assigned reading homework to children and parents and sent texts (sometimes controlled, sometimes free choice) earlier too, but I never got to know whether they got through the reading, what struggles they faced, how the parent supported the child and their reading, what breakthroughs they had, and what support they needed from me. 

When I asked the parents what transpired during reading, they were able to give me very little detail. They’d say, “He didn’t know a few words,” and wouldn’t remember which words, or “I helped him with this word,” but wouldn’t know how exactly they helped. When I pressed for details, one of them said, “I cannot explain it. Let me video-record today’s reading and send it to you.” It was an excellent idea until I got dizzy from all the shaky videos I got. Plus, the child was so focused on the recording that the reading no longer reflected his actual ability. That’s when I asked the parent to record only audio. 

Listening to the child and parent navigating a text together in the safety and comfort of their homes gave me access to a ton of data in very little time. I got not only formative data which helped me decide what to teach next, what to reteach because it hasn’t stuck, or what to revisit, but also clarity on how to help the parent help the child. 

Here are ten of the many examples of how audio recordings helped me be a more effective reading teacher: 

1. Catch early that the parent is supporting the child by sounding out words instead of spelling out words. Teach the parent the difference and help them transition to spelling out words. 

2. Provide guidance on how much to wait before supplying a word to the child. Avoid extremes of frustrating the child by never helping them out or supplying words before the child has had a chance to try. 

3. Catch and tackle guessing. Provide sentence frames and games to the parents to help them discourage guessing without getting frustrated. 

4. Catch early on that the child needs more practice with short vowel sounds, for instance. Switch to a better resource immediately for targeted practice. 

5. Get an idea of whether there is comprehension while reading through the child’s questions and the parent’s answers or vice versa. 

6. Provide guidance to the parent on how to effectively handle the child’s questions. For instance, directing the child back to the text: 

   1. “I think we just read why Dan wanted the toy in this paragraph. Let’s check again.” 

   2. “Yeah! Why is Nat not interested in the food? I have the same question. Let’s read some more; we might find out.” 

7. Provide the parent with ideas for what to do when the child is frustrated with the reading. 

8. Switch to echo reading, dyad reading, or partner reading as appropriate when it’s time to focus on fluency, for instance. 

9. Catch parent misunderstandings in the language and provide correct explanations. 

10. Notice, appreciate, and celebrate the parent’s invaluable and irreplaceable role in the child’s literacy. Catch excellent teaching moves and let them know what they just did and why it’s great. 

In the rest of this post, I share with you a text I sent the parent for reading HW, the audio recording I received, and feedback I gave the parent based on the data I gathered from the recording.