Friday, October 11, 2013

Going with a Classic - Shared Reading

It has been a busy week! My new intervention groups are up and running, and it is good to be back in the full swing of things. I was getting pretty tired of testing! At least for the time being, I will be spending a lot of time in Kindergarten, more than I ever have before. With this new focus, I have been working on my early intervention strategies. One of my favorite activities for my budding readers is the classic shared reading.

(Sorry about the glare!)

I assessed my students using the Concepts of Print assessment by Marie Clay. Many of the students knew very little about the basic features of print or the organization of books. I have been using shared reading to help my students with directionality, one to one correspondence, concept of word, concept of letter, punctuation, and just a bit of comprehension. For my first story, I chose a cute poem about a worm. The students loved that the worm was found in an apple! The story also had some fantastic vocabulary: squirm and wiggly.


Our second shared reading was a poem about a pumpkin. Some of the activities I include in my shared reading are: letting the students point to each word as I read, letting students circle individual letters, and having students underline entire words. We have also begun to work on capital vs. lowercase letters. This is pretty tricky for my students right now. Soon enough, we will also touch on rhyming. 

Overall, I love how interactive shared readings are. They are so organic and allow students to learn about the concepts of print in a way that makes text accessible to emerging readers.

Do you use shared reading? Do you have any favorite songs, poems, or stories that you use?



2 comments:

  1. Cute poems! I haven't used shared reading in the past, but maybe I will with my first graders...I bet they would love a Halloween poem, and we could work on short vowels!

    -Maria
    Everyone deServes to Learn

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  2. I love using shared reading, but our new reading series puts it off until later in kindergarten. Since we have to follow it to fidelity for the first few years to see how it works, I have to hold back with it too. It is driving me crazy! I love my fun fall poems and will have to use them with first grade instead!

    Have fun!

    Andrea
    Reading Toward the Stars

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Thank you for the comment! I love hearing what you think!