AUSSIE

Blog entry posted March 6th, 2009 by Noel Ridge

Teachers are always looking to engage students in ways that really motivate them and encourage problem solving in a deeper way.

For me a natural first place to focus on is with Reading Aloud TO students.

A wide variety of materials in many genres, and a balance of factual and fictional texts can be read to students to model strategy use.
Read Aloud is often chosen as a teaching practice because the text presents too many challenges for students to read on their own, or because the learners are unsure as to how to apply effective strategies.

For Read Aloud, teachers choose:

• Large quantities of quality texts
• A block of time each day scheduled to ensure that the practice takes place
• To demonstrate that the activity is very important for children, by reading to children every day
• To model to students’ fluent and expressive reading
• To plan read aloud activities that focus on particular content areas, authors or text types as well as using both picture story, short story and chapter books.

Choosing a wide selection of texts for Read Aloud enables the introduction of eight key comprehension strategies; so teachers model how effective readers use strategies before, during and after reading to make meaning.

Then they use Shared Reading WITH students in a comprehensive balanced literacy framework, Shared Reading is part of the daily reading workshop.

During Shared Reading, students gather at a meeting place in the classroom where they sit comfortably with an unobstructed view of an enlarged text.

Enlarged texts were originally in the form of Big Books, or teacher made charts, the way that Don Holdaway and others developed the “Shared Book Experience” in New Zealand in the late 1970’s.  However, more recently teachers are starting to use, the “Interactive White Board”, or a data projector image projected on a screen, or a screen where the OHP transparency is projected has proven to be highly effective for Shared Reading.

Students then become part of a co-operative reading experience, where all children, regardless of their ability or reading level are engaged in the reading process.

They are supported by a “safe”, risk free environment in which the whole class is led by the teacher in the reading of a text.

In today’s digital age we find that texts that come enlarged as Overhead Transparences or better yet digital texts for the Interactive White Board or Data Projector are met with a higher level of student engagement.

Shared Reading with digital texts can be used to:

• Explicitly model reading strategies;
• Expand students’ knowledge of literature and language;
• Introduce students to new concepts and understandings from various content areas;
• Heighten enjoyment and understandings of poems, songs and rhymes;
• Demonstrate a variety of book language, print features and styles of writing;
• Enable students to become familiar with a range of factual and fictional genres;
• Increase students’ vocabulary and high–frequency word knowledge;
• Form a basis for planned word study including sound and spelling pattern investigations.

There are many great commercial digital text resources on the market.
It is important to note that in a class with an LCD projector but no interactive whiteboard, all of the interactivity of the digital texts can still be used on a standard whiteboard, screen or even a classroom wall, by controlling the tools with the mouse, from the computer.

Try using digital texts and see for yourself how the LCD projected images and Interactive White Board technology can bring texts to life, and engage students as they interact with text in ways that static texts do not allow.

Then, leave me a comment or a question and be sure to let me know how it goes!

 --Noel Ridge, AUSSIE Consultant