If you’re familiar with Shared Reading, you know that it differs from guided reading. I opened my reading block with shared reading on a daily basis. Why? There are so many benefits to shared reading that you might not be aware of! It’s a great activity to do during your circle time!
Why Shared Reading?
It’s important to use shared reading as a growth tool in your reading block. Growth tool? But how? Shared reading is a great tool to use when you want to model grade level text. Reading grade level texts as a whole group not only helps your more advanced learners, but its also a great tool to help your struggling readers hear words correctly.
Another way I noticed that shared reading helped was my students were less fearful in speaking during this time of my reading block. No way would I have a students stand up and read the poem to the class (unless there were volunteers), but I would pair my students to practice reading the poem. This was less intimidating for my more timid students.
How to Schedule
What I learned is that I couldn’t just use different readings every day of the week. I learned quick that I wasn’t getting any benefits from it when they were seeing so many poems a week. Instead of working harder, I worked smarter! I came up with this easy to follow schedule when I created my shared reading poems.
- Monday: Introduce poem, invite predictions. Have students echo read . Discuss the poems message.
- Tuesday: Read the poem together. Use the poem to introduce or reinforce new print concepts. Popcorn or highlight sight words or high frequency words and highlight chucks or word patterns.
- Wednesday: Read the poem together. Discuss new/interesting vocabulary. Add words to vocabulary wall.
- Thursday: Read the poem together. Move/stomp/clap/snap the the rhythm and count syllables in words.
- Friday: Have a student lead the students in reading the poem. Students add the poem to the poetry notebook. (popcorn/highlight sight words and illustrate)
As you can see from my detailed schedule, I covered so many skills in just a short period of time every day. And we used the same poem for that entire week. My students loved our circle time because they knew we were going to learn and practice different skills with the same reading.
And I loved listening to all the different messages/ideas/questions, especially from those timid students.
You can grab this free poem from my April Shared Reading pack by clicking on the link below!
Looking for more literacy ideas? I can help you!
Balanced Literacy was the basis of my literacy block in my classroom. In my blog, I shared my easy to follow balanced literacy schedule that you can implement right away!
Grab my free beginning literacy assessment to use at the start of your curriculum! You can use it any time of the year to watch the growth of your learners!
Continue practicing sight words and high frequency words with my free Pirate Bingo Game! And it’s editable so you can use any words you want!
