Last week, the prep students began their sessions of shared reading. Shared reading involves the whole class and the teacher reading an enlarged text that is beyond the level students can read by themselves.
Big books with enlarged text and illustrations are used so that students can follow the words as the teacher reads. Initially the teacher may do much of the reading. However, as students become more familiar with the text they will assume more control, particularly at repetitive sections or when rhyme and rhythm are present.
Shared reading will take place daily to support children with a variety of reading strategies such as:
- making predictions and making connections with their own experiences
- tracking of words within a text using a finger and later with their eyes
- study of specific letter and/ or high frequency words
- looking at initial letter/s and context of the text to predict unknown words
Below is a photograph of a lesson where a student is helping the class track each word in the text using the pointer.
The big books that are in our neighbourhood are The Meanies, The Jigaree and Smarty Pants.
