Joyful Learning through Shared Reading (K–2)

How do we support learners to understand how to use language, print concepts, rhyme, and rhythm in service of meaning? This K–2 session will explore how shared book experiences build children’s reading processes as they co-construct meaning through talking with others and offer teachers the opportunity to demonstrate how skills and strategies help us get to meanings in texts.

Shared Reading develops language as readers to learn to navigate print and graphics within a known text. In the first readings of a text, attention goes to the overall meanings of the text. Once students become familiar with the text by revisiting it with their class, the text serves as a demonstration tool for showing how to print and other visuals are connected to meaning. Skills and strategy use in context is supported through multiple revisits.

Lessons might include bringing awareness to text structure or features, noticing print features such as quotation marks or periods, or using initial letters to confirm the word being read. Each rereading of the text strengthens student’s use of their syntactic, or grammatical, cueing system, as they automatically anticipate the words in the text; this leads to more integration of cueing systems as they read independently. Without powerful shared reading, especially early in kindergarten, students may not develop the understandings, behaviors, and attitudes about books and print to enable them to be successful in the early emergent and emergent stages of guided reading.

Materials that may be emphasized:
Lift Off to Literacy™, Flying Start to Literacy™