Hi Sarah. Hi Sarah. My name is Holly. Hi Sarah. My name is April. I'm in Melbourne, Australia.

I have a question about my name is Julie Ann and we live in India. I am wondering,

Hi Sarah. This is Crystal from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Can you give me a suggestion for an especially fabulous book?

Hey there. I'm Sarah McKenzie. This is the Read-A-Loud Revival. And in this short episode,

I'm answering one of your questions. My question is around my developing reader. When she's reading

a loud, she does not have a whole lot of difficulties with the bigger words, but what I'm finding is when

she's reading aloud, she tends to skip a lot of those connecting words, like the word the with and. And

so what happens is there's that disconnect in making that a complete sentence, making it more difficult

for her to have comprehension of what that sentence means. When she's reading to herself, I don't think

that's an issue. So I would love any feedback on that. And if anybody else is experiencing this with

their developing reader. Hey Kelly, thank you for this question. First of all, this is super normal.

When we read with our eyes, we skip stuff. Actually, the better readers we are with our eyes, like if we're

just reading silently to ourselves, the more words we skip, the faster we get and the more words we skip.

That's just sort of as you gain fluency and speed in your reading, you can skip a lot of those

small connector words and still understand what's happening. Then when you try and read it aloud,

it doesn't work so well, right? Because the sentences don't make sense. Because our brains aren't doing

that work of filling in the connector words when we read out loud. So I would bet she's a darn good

reader silently. But reading aloud requires that we slow down and read every single word and order.

And that's actually where a lot of the benefit of reading aloud in the first place comes in.

Because we want grammatically correct, sophisticated language patterns to be stored in our children's

brains. And when we read them aloud or they read them aloud or they listen to an audiobook, those

words read aloud are said one at a time, no words are skipped. And so those language patterns are

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