Casey Lyles- December Blog Post- Routman Ch. 9: Emphasize Shared Reading

Routman encourages teachers to make shared reading an integral part of our reading program.  Shared reading can be a great way to demonstrate and support what good readers do.  Students are able to see text, listen to it being read, and then join along.  It can be a powerful bonding experience between teachers and students as well.  Routman includes a great framework for shared reading that can be utilized in all grade levels within this chapter. 

Shared reading is one of my favorite times in my classroom.  It can provide encouragement to students and boost their reading self-esteem by joining in on the predictable text.  Students are often apprehensive about reading aloud out of fear they will not know a word.  Shared reading encourages everyone to read together so even the lowest readers in the classroom can feel included and have a positive experience reading out loud to their classmates and teacher.  Shared reading not only builds confidence in my students but it also builds their fluency and word familiarity as well as provide practice in phonemic awareness.  Shared reading time is also a great opportunity to share a variety of genres with students such as non-fiction and poetry.  I am able to demonstrate tracking the text, reading with expression, stopping at punctuation, as well as assess my student’s ability to make connections, predictions and inferences. Within non-fiction texts, it is a great opportunity to point out headings, italicized words, labeled pictures, diagrams, etc.  Routman mentions many times throughout this chapter that students should be involved in discussing the text with the teacher and peers. I feel like I do a thorough job of this in my classroom.  I use the term “turn and talk” with my students and during that time they are to turn to a neighbor and discuss what we have read/learned.  It is a way to hold them accountable and to also allow each student to talk.  As much as I want to, there is never enough time to let all students share their ideas with me.  Allowing them to turn and talk to each other provides an opportunity for everyone’s ideas to be heard by someone and I am able to listen to multiple conversations to assess student understanding and get an idea of what they took away from the shared reading experience.