I enjoyed reading this article and found it quite easy to read. I think shared reading is very important in your classroom; no matter if you teach kindergarten or 8th grade. One thing I found meaningful was the section in the article on vocabulary. I think vocabulary is so important for students to know. I also feel that it is very important for students to be able to figure out the meanings of words through the use of context clues, word parts, and resources. I also like to order in which these are presented. You would not want students to look all their vocabulary words up on the internet and in the dictionary before they looked for context clues and word parts. I agree with the expert teachers in the article, and would always look for context clues first. I would then look at the word part and what each part means. If neither of these things helped students figure out the meaning of the word, I would then let them use other resources. I also felt like these 25 expert teachers were all on the same page, especially when the authors of the article asked teachers about letting students “skip it”. Some of the teachers were shocked because they would never encourage their students to just skip words they do not know. One teacher made a great point about giving permission to a struggling reader to skip words. I totally understand her point. Can you imagine how many words a student would skip? The story would probably not make any sense to the reader, and the reader would be gaining nothing. I really thought this article was quite helpful. I look at shared reading in a whole new light. I am ready to embrace shared reading!
Shared Readings: Modeling, comprehension, vocabulary, text structures and text features
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