Just like Words Their Way is an explicit approach to teaching phonics, Shared Reading is an explicit way to teach children comprehension and decoding strategies when reading. It benefits the students, because they are able to hear you “think out-loud” and try out your thinking strategies as you read to them. Explicit modeling is key when teaching any type of reading strategy. Shared reading is also a way to introduce students to vivid vocabulary and more complex text, because you are there to scaffold. This will expose readers who are not used to reading texts past instructional level.According to the article Complex Text or Frustration- Level Text,”Reading and discussing complex texts with compelling issues, novice readers begin to identify as members of a literacy community and become more aware of the purposes of reading than when reading easier instructional level texts” (Stahl, 2012).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5V1g1cp5PVk
Here is a video of shared reading in a first grade classroom. This teacher models thinking aloud well for her students. I sometimes reference this video when I am planning for my students to make sure I am on target with my shared reading strategies and procedures.
Evidence 1: Lesson plan for Shared Reading
In my Shared Reading lesson you will read about how I explicitly taught the decoding strategy of looking for parts of a word that you know (chunking) and looking at the beginning letters or even the size of the word to help decode a word. I integrated technology in this lesson as well. I created an interactive page that would allow me to cover up words (written cloze) in sentences. At the end I used a formal assessment that helped me see what the students had learned during my lesson. My formal assessment consisted of having the students write three decoding strategies we learned about that day. All but one student was able to name three if not more decoding strategies that were discussed, modeled and tried that day.
Evidence 2: Written Cloze
During the above lesson I used the teaching strategy called Written Cloze. Written Cloze is when you cover up a word in the story (poem, song…etc) you are reading together and with the students, you discuss what word would make sense, what word would sound right and then as you uncover the word you talk about whether the word looks right or not. This allows students to use all three of their reading cueing systems. Their reading cueing systems are meaning, structural and visual.
http://bogglesworldesl.com/cloze_activities.htm
Here is a helpful webpage that gives examples of written cloze activities. I found it helpful when planning for my written cloze strategy during shared reading.
Alyssa Huth 