Shared Reading

Shared reading is an important teaching technique that is often used for the primary grades. Shared reading teaches primary skills through real life texts and provides children with successful reading experiences. A good shared reading experience allows for students to be able to re-read familiar texts such as predictable texts or poems, and then the students focus in on rimes in words used in the poem such as (-ing, -est, or –ly). These kinds of lessons strengthen sight words, vocabulary, and fluency while having an enjoyable class experience. I encourage the class to re-read the selection as many times as possible until it is becoming no longer enjoyable. Varying the reading by dividing into groups and switching reading lines, making motions to go along with it or even reading it one person at a time allows extension of the amount of times reading. Teaching rimes as opposed to phonics allows children to learn to use chunk association to build and recognize other words (such as fate, date, rate). This improves fluency and sight word recognition. There are five steps in the basic shared reading lesson: reading, introducing a skill, working with words, writing, and re-reading. As discussed earlier, reading is done repetitively so that it becomes a familiar text and improves fluency and sight word recognition. Introducing a skill is when the teacher directs the students to identify the specific rime (word ending) of the selection and then determine each rime included in it. Working with the words allows children to explore other words that include the rime of the lesson extending their fluency and building on prior knowledge to form a schema. Writing will use these rimes or the style of the selection so that the students can create a piece of writing inspired by the lesson. The fifth step, re-reading, occurs at a later time. It would be ideal to make a compilation of all of the shared reading selections and later allows the students to re-read it or illustrate the page in their notebook of shared reading texts. The rime lessons are written on a poster during the lesson (all of the words that include the rime) and are posted for future reference around the room.