Shared Reading

shared reading using a “big” book with kindergarteners

I will never forget when I first fell in love with shared reading. I was teaching in San Diego and had the privilege of attending a professional development session with Brenda Parkes, the author of Read It Again! Revisiting Shared Reading (2000). As she stood on a stage rapping (yes . . . literally beatboxing) one of her big books, The Wolf’s Story, I was mesmerized. I could not wait to return to my classroom and apply her methods and thinking around shared reading with my first graders.

Over twenty years later, shared reading is still close to my heart. Shared reading is a bridge between reading aloud to children and/or working with readers in guided reading groups. Readers work to fluently read, reread, and understand benchmark (grade-level) texts during whole-class shared reading cycles. During each shared reading session, teachers read a text with students, ensuring the text is visible to the class.  The text could be in a big book format, projectable format, individual student copies, or charted.  The selected text should be short (I prefer excerpts of texts for grades 3-5) and based on the benchmark reading level for a particular grade and corresponding time of year.  Shared reading usually runs 10-15 minutes a session with the same text over a four/five-day cycle.  Each day of the cycle has a different focus that is ultimately in service of understanding the text.

My vision of a shared reading cycle has been adapted over time based on the work of Maria Cassiani Iams and Sarah Daunis. They share their work in their book, Text Savvy: Using a Shared Reading Framework to Build Comprehension Grades 3-6. My cycles often flow like this:

  • Day 1 - preview, predict before reading and orient during and after reading to confirm or revise predictions

  • Day 2 - application of phonological awareness work (K-2) or text annotation for phonics, vocabulary as well as reader’s choice (3-5)

  • Day 3 - envisioning and acting the text out based on story elements, vocabulary and phrases

  • Day 4 - inferring and discussing central ideas and supporting them with details from the text

  • Day 5 - responding to reading by acting, drawing, jotting or writing to a prompt

Each day of the cycle is flexible. If a particular text has more vocabulary work to be done (e.g. historical fiction), I may spend two sessions focused on “day 2” work and collapse or let go of other days in the cycle. All of my planning choices are based both on my students’ needs at the time and the text’s complexity, ultimately in service of developing rich understandings of benchmark texts.