Shared Reading

1. Shared Reading

2. Characteristics • Grouping Options: One-on-One, small group, large group • Heterogeneous—mixed levels • Materials: Picture Books, Big Books • Major focus areas: • Reading for enjoyment, • Modeling concepts about print, • Reinforcing language conventions, • Reinforcing word patterns, sentence patterns, and story patterns. • Repeated reading of a text

3. Benefits • Children are active participants in the reading. • The shared reading experience helps students see reading as pleasurable and meaningful (Butler & Turbill, 1987). • It helps students develop concepts about reading and language: • including about story and narrative, • rhythm and rhyme, • the relationship between print and speech, • conventions such as punctuation, and • it helps them with specific letter–sound correspondences and word recognition. • The use of big books also gives students opportunities to learn about language together as a classroom community (Davidson, 1989).

4. Big Books • Big books that are most useful for shared reading are those where: • the amount and location of text on a page is controlled, and • where the language is repetitive and/or otherwise predictable. • Such books encourage: • students’ participation, • facilitate their learning about books, stories and story structures, • facilitate their knowledge of language patterns and structures, and • scaffold their later attempts to read the story independently. 

5. Types of Predictable Big Books • Rhyme and rhythm—the sentences have a strong rhythm, or beat, and rhyme may be used at the end of sentences. • Seuss, Dr. (1963). Hop on Pop. New York: Random House. • Guarino, Deborah (1989). Is Your Mama a Llama? New York, NY: Scholastic, Inc. • Repetitive sentences—these books have phrases or sentences that will repeat throughout the book. • Carle, Eric. From Head to Toe. New York, NY: Philomel. • Martin, Bill, Jr. (1983). Brown, Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. • Cumulative pattern—phrases or sentences are repeated with each page and new phrases are added as the story unfolds. • Galdone, P. (1979). The Little Red Hen. New York, NY: Clarion. • Simms, T. (2002). The House that Jack Built. New York, NY: Putnam. • Sequential pattern—these books use colors, numbers, alphabet, or other patterns to move through the book. • Numeroff, L. J. (1985). If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. New York, NY: HarperCollins. • Wood, A. (1984). The Napping House. San Diego, CA: HarperCollins.

6. Guidelines • Begin by introducing the book. • Discuss the author and illustrator. • Give a brief overview of what the book will be about. • When reading the book, make sure that all children can easily see the book (Ruddell, 1999). • As you read the book, track the print using a pointer or your finger, so that students can follow and in order to reinforce such concepts as left-to-right and top-to-bottom directionality and the one-to-one correspondence between the spoken word and the written word. • Where relevant, make and ask for predictions about the story (e.g., by saying “I’ll bet this is a story about…, I wonder what will happen next…”). • Explore key vocabulary. • Invite children to repeat key words or phrases of the story and thereby to join in the reading.

7. Things to Remember • Usually, you will share a book at least a few times, with the students increasingly being able to join in. • Remember each time to track the print as you read. After one or two readings, encourage the children to join in with you by echoing what you read. • On subsequent rereadings of the book, cover up word or word parts with sticky notes, then focus students’ attention on: • word structure (letter-sounds, onset-rime patterns, inflections, syllables), and • language patterns (repetition, rhyme, unique words).

8. Extending the Shared Reading • Write the story, or a portion of the story, on sentence strips so that students can retell or build the story in a pocket chart (McCracken & McCracken, 1995). • Have the students write their own big book pages that extend the story, showing what would happen next. • Encourage the students to act out the story as a creative drama activity. You might assign each student a character and have the students wear index cards with their characters’ names (Fisher & Medvic, 2000). • Have the students dramatize the story but with puppets as the characters (Fisher & Medvic, 2000).