read a little louder

When I first started teaching I thought I did a pretty good read aloud. My kinders generally were paying attention and I was hoping they were getting something out of it. I have to admit, I'm not sure how many read alouds I did in a day or how well they were ever planned.

Boy, have I grown and changed! Now I fit in as many read alouds as I can and I have grown to incorporate all of the aspects of balanced literacy into our day. I choose to incorporate shared reading into our day, which I learned, has value way beyond what I first thought it did. I've tweaked my shared reading since that first year, but it has helped me be super effective with modeling first the concepts of print, to modeling reading strategies and developing phonemic awareness (and a touch of phonics) with my kinders.

I love using big books in my room
but don't often use them for the purpose of shared reading as probably do most teachers. I didn't have any access to quality big books, really when I first started. My kinders needed to know fairy tales and nursery rhymes to be successful on their standardized assessments in the future and they weren't exactly being taught that anywhere outside of my classroom. So, in place of the big books my colleagues were using, I chose poetry... nursery rhymes....singing.

And I could make those resources myself. That's where I began. I chose a poem or nursery rhyme to help emphasize a letter of the alphabet. We do a different activity each day of the week with the poem and its all pretty interactive. No worksheets here. Did you read...

This concept works along the same principle. We use many short bits of time to reinforce a concept over an entire week. The daily repetition, interactive nature and explicit instruction have been invaluable to laying a foundation with my readers. What does that look like? Let me break it down by day...

Monday, we are introduced to the poem, one strip at a time.

At the beginning of the year? We are first introduced to our reading strategies one at a time and always start with a picture and formulate guesses on what this poem could be about. We learn more strategies that good readers use, and practice those. The question that my kinders always hear the most on this day is, "What do you notice?" We use a giant plastic magnifying glass (from the Dollar Tree - normally used for bug catching) to share little bits we find, show punctuation and make connections. We do our best to figure bits and pieces out and celebrate our hard work by listening to the poem on CD.

We break it down a bit differently as the year progresses and we start to know the strategies like sight words.

Tuesday, we review what we noticed yesterday and model growth in pointing 1:1-tracking along with someone else reading (aka the CD player). This one is tricky, especially in the fall (which I try not to laugh out loud) but usually brings up good tracking strategies and ultimately scanning techniques by the end. We love using our expanding sight word base as a model of finding your place in print and connecting it to what you're hearing.

Wednesday, we start out by sitting on a word card ( a second set of the poem cut up into pieces) which I lay out like place cards on the floor before we begin. They study their word, we discuss letters vs. words and how many letters are in each word. I call up students by number of letters in their word and all kinds of things and they come up and match it to the text. We model matching as this is a skill too, to be learned.

I love how eventually (we're talking spring, people) this turns into... "If you have the word _____, come add it to the poem." And they know their word even if its way above their reading level because they used all of their reading strategies to put it into the right context of a familiar piece of text. And we even add the kicker that they have to remember which word was theirs and we read it through and they clap when it's their word. Then we have to do it and jump instead of clap. Jumping is always the best.

Thursday, we highlight the focus letter (from our five days, five minutes) present in the poem and then work on hearing it being used in each word. We read it through and clap on those words with highlighted portions, then we do it again and jump. We get to be the detectives and love it. Oooh, when we get to vowels, what fun discussion we have about all the sounds we hear once they have been highlighted and brought to our listening attention.

Friday, we circle rhyming words with wikki sticks. This skill is tough on kindergarten ears when words are not in isolation, but definitely gets easier by the spring. My favorite part is to pull two words that are the same word (diddle, diddle) and make a big deal over how they rhyme. They love correcting my error. Then I repeat with fussing over how two words that simply start with the same sound "rhyme" (diddle, dog). Catching my error and having to explain why its not a rhyming word has been huge in helping my kinders with the need to develop some serious phonemic awareness skills. We always use an ear tugging sign to connect rhyming words to a motion. So we clap and jump on the rhyming pairs to review the learning we've done here too. By the end of the year this really lends itself to word family discussions.

So, think I've maximized all I can out of one little Hey Diddle Diddle? Oh no, now that I've laid the foundation for reading strategies, modeling concepts of print and phonemic awareness... now I spread that foundation towards the toes of each kinder as they take our shared reading activities to two different independent literacy centers. But, lets save that for another post shall we?