Read It Again! By Brenda Parkes

Shared Reading At best, such sharing of books provides a way of delighting the child both in the texts and in their own capacity to learn from and about the texts. ~Marilyn Adams Shared reading is a collaborative learning activity the emulates and builds from the child’s experience with bedtime stories. The purpose of shared reading is to provide children with an enjoyable reading experience and to teach children how to be independent readers and writers. Remember- At-home reading should be intimate. Remember to respect and respond to readers. It’s a good idea to reread favorites and keep plenty of books readily available.

Shared Reading in the Classroom: Capturing the Essentials of the Bedtime Story Capitalizing on the active and social nature of children’s learning, early instruction must provide rich demonstrations, interactions and models of literacy in the course of activities that make sense to young children. ~IRA and NAEYC joint position statement, ’98. Elements for success include: creating an intimate environment, selecting a variety of texts, inviting activity participation, collaboratively negotiating meaning, revisiting and rereading favorite books, and allowing time for independent confirmation and exploration. Essential tools include: sturdy easel, pointers, storage areas for books, post-it notes, correction tape, sentence strips, pocket charts, word cards, magnetic boards, magnetic letters, white board, highlighter tape, Wikki Stix, sliding masks, and chart paper.

Using Shared Reading for Implicit and Explicit Instruction Teachers serve as guides so that children know how to engage in purposeful self direction. ~Billie Askew and Irene Fountas The supportive context of shared reading provides a meaningful way for the teacher to: Show genuine enjoyment in reading Model how readers think and act Model fluent, phrased reading Build on the interests and abilities of learners Teach book and print conventions Ensure the use of various skills and strategies for reading and comprehension Explore semantics, syntax, and graphophonics. Engage children in talk about texts Demonstrate relationship between reading and writing Show how to read for different purposes Balance implicit and explicit teaching Semantics relates to the meaning system of language; syntax means structural information; graphophonics refers to the letter-sound systems of language

Shared Reading in Action The style of teaching … might be called invitational- an enthusiastic invitation to participate, contribute, take over the operation. ~ Don Holdaway Guided reading immediately follows shared reading. This allows teachers to draw on shared reading experiences for independent small-group work that allows children to apply skills and strategies to better their reading. Rereading favorites is important because it builds as solid, secure base of known books, which acts as a spring board for exploring the new! Great activities after shared reading include: Word matching Making onsets and rimes using magnetic letters Independent reading of small-book versions of the big book Sequence sentence strips on a pocket chart Cover words in a shared text with blank paper and allow students to choose words that meaningful fill the blanks. This activity involves prediction, checking, self correction, and discussion

How Shared Reading Contributes to the Other Components of a Balanced Literacy Program A balanced reading program includes a range of literacy activities, carefully selected materials for each activity, and a responsive teacher. ~ Linda J. Dorn, Cathy French, and Tammy Jones Sharing reading is the driving force at the center of a balanced literacy program and contributes to all aspects of it! Shared reading texts should always initially be about the current reading level of the learners, thereby engaging them in new experiences and concepts. Shared reading from a range of text types provides powerful models for children’s own writing. The skills and strategies children are expected to use in guided reading can be taught during shared reading. Shared and guided reading are interwoven practices. Small group activities using shared reading resources include: working in pairs at an easel with big books and pointers, audiotapes, word cards and sentence strips, and sequencing text and pictures. These activities are especially helpful for ESL learners.

Working with Narrative Texts The focus must be on ways in which the author encourages readers to feel as if their hands are on the author’s pen, confident of the direction the story is most likely to follow. ~ Margaret Mooney Shared reading of narrative texts encourages children to: Think and act like readers Make connections across and between texts Make connections with life and texts Learn about plots, characters, settings, and themes Experience a range of language and concepts Think like authors and illustrators Orchestrate the cueing systems Children should be encouraged to think about the text before, during, and after the reading. Center and Small Group Activities Ideas include: sequencing pictures for retelling, stretch the story, add dialogue bubbles for each character, match dialogue bubbles to characters, match appropriate words to characters using word cards.

Informational Texts Pupils are to become part of the shared and sharing thinking which not only gives them access to knowledge but also lets them create and interpret it because it has become alive for them. ~ Margaret Meek To become effective readers of informational texts students need to understand: The features that identify nonfiction books The selective way nonfiction is read according to the reader’s purpose The ways organizational features such as indexes, contents pages, glossaries, and headlines help the reader access a text. The specialized language and language structures used to convey information. How visual literacy such as photographs, diagrams, maps, and charts combine with the written text to convey information How information in caption and labels combines with running text to convey information Strategies for using prior knowledge and experience to engage in inquiry with texts

Innovating on Shared Reading Books: The Reading-Writing Connection The children respond with a delighted feeling of authorship, enjoying the opportunity for a genuinely personal and creative experience yet supported by the familiar structure. ~ Don Holdaway Ways to extend informational texts through innovations include: Writing a contents page, index, glossary, or additional glossary entry Creating heading and subheadings Adding captions or labels written on Post-it notes Writing about children’s own experiences of the topic and adding it as an appendix Adding other entries based on the structure of the book Presenting the information through other graphic forms, such as diagrams, time lines, and charts Writing questions that could be the basis of further research

Choosing Resources for Shared Reading A reader must develop a self-extending system for himself and to do so requires appropriate texts that are rich in information. ~ Marie Clay Excellent book choices have ~ simple, satisfying story line, strong, rhythmic quality to the language, rhyme, repetition, action, and a dramatic ending. Children’s literacy learning attitudes can be groups broadly into three overlapping states: emergent, early, and fluent. Shared reading helps emergent readers find delight in reading, develop positive concepts of themselves as readers, think and act like readers and writers, develop print concepts, develop phonemic awareness, and use pictures to predict meaning, just to name a few. Some supportive texts for these readers include: Mrs. Wishy-Washy, Brown Bear, Brown Bear, Farmer Schnuck, and the Gingerbread Man.

Choosing Resources for Shared Reading Continued… Shared reading helps early readers build momentum, self-monitor, work on phrasing, and notice details from picture cues, just to name a few. Great book choices for early readers include: A Farm’s Not a Farm, Who’s in the Shed?, Chicken Little, The Three Little Pigs, The Life of a Butterfly, Animals in Hiding, and Jack and the Beanstalk. Supportive text for fluent readers helps them read with ease, maintain meaning over longer texts, draw inferences, learn to interpret pictures, diagrams, charts, and tables, and to change their way of reading to suit their purpose, just to name a few. Great book choices for fluent readers include: Rumpelstiltskin, Why Flies Buzz, Investigating Your Backyard,

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