Skills Taught During Shared Reading Experience

● Meaning is the best guide for solving:

This means that when children come to a word they don’t know they should be encouraged to make a meaningful guess based on what they think would fit and make sense.  Their first strategy should not be to sound it out.

● Directional Conventions:

Through watching the teacher turn the page, and pointing to the words as they read, the children learn that print runs from left to right and top to bottom, that we read words and not the pictures and that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the written and spoken word.

● Prediction:

Children need to learn to predict using the context of the story, the pictures, the sentence structure, and lastly, the letter detail.  They should be encouraged to be risk takers and rewarded for all meaningful guesses.

● Self-Correction:

The children must ultimately be responsible for their own correcting and final accuracy.  If a child reads something and doesn’t self-correct, the teacher should interject at the end of the sentence or phrase.  Ask the child if what they said made sense and if necessary, repeat the question.  The teacher should avoid doing the correcting.  As the children begin to read, they should be encouraged to confirm their own responses by use of meaning, sentence structure, and letter detail.

● Sight Vocabulary:

Once the children have one-to-one correspondence between the spoken and written word they begin to develop their sight vocabulary.  If some basic heavy-duty words are repeated again and again, the children learn to recognize them on sight.  This should always be done in context.

● Letter-Sound Association:

Once the children can discriminate between the sounds of particular letters, they are ready to focus on the print used to represent those sounds.

● Letter Names:

It is useful to refer to letters by their name, rather than the sound they represent, because not every letter represents just one sound.  Confusion will be avoided if the sounds are always taught and tested in the context of a word.

● Conventions of Punctuation:

When the teacher is reading to the children and they are joining in, they quickly learn to use punctuation marks as a guide for reading.

● Intonation Patterns:

Through effective modeling, the children can build up their store of the stress and intonation pattern.  This is an enormous aid for predicting language patterns.

● Stories Suitable for the Shared Reading Experience: