1 Introducing shared reading

Start by looking at a poem used for sharing reading.

Activity 1: Shared reading

Shared reading means that you lead your students in reading the text and you are a strong role model for reading. Students must be able to see and follow the text along with you.

In shared reading, you:

  • encourage all students to follow the text as you read, using your hand or a stick as a pointer
  • have students join in the reading, repeat after you or read in chorus
  • model how to read with expression
  • demonstrate how to read and pronounce new words
  • focus on letters, words and sentences as you go along, but always keeping the overall meaning and enjoyment.

Look at the poem in Figure 1, written out on a large piece of paper. It was created by a teacher for Class II students. Read it aloud.

Figure 1 A shared reading poem.

Pause for thought

  • What can the teacher and the students do with the blank spaces in the poem?
  • What would be the effect of having children’s names in the poem?
  • Why do you think the teacher has highlighted the words ‘I’, ‘to’, ‘school’ and ‘the’?
  • Do you think it would be fun to read this aloud with young students?
  • Do you think shared reading of this poem could include all students, regardless of their abilities?
  • What is the effect of letting students decorate the poem?

You can make a shared reading text on any subject, such as parts of the body, numbers, a history or geography topic, or the words of a song. See the hand-made example in Figure 2.

Figure 2 Shared reading using the subject of rainbows.

If you are a teacher who teaches all the subjects, shared reading can develop and reinforce both subject knowledge and language skills.

What you can learn in this unit

2 Selecting a text for shared reading