(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?
